While the legal system was intended to create “order, balance and a sacred equilibrium within individuals and society,” it ends up contributing to “social ills among those who were its primary guardians.”

Winter 2006 | COVER STORY

Searching for Fulfillment

BY GAIL FRIEDMAN | ILLUSTRATIONS BY KEN ORVIDAS

A divorce lawyer’s client wants to hide assets from his spouse. An attorney who volunteers with the homeless is forced to start eviction proceedings on a poor family. A lawyer fervently opposed to capital punishment represents a death row inmate who refuses to exhaust his appeals. Whether these are ethical, spiritual or religious quandaries — or no quandary at all — depends on an individual lawyer’s beliefs.

Assuming, of course, that lawyers have beliefs.

That flippancy is only partly tongue-in-cheek. David Hall, a professor and former dean at the School of Law and former provost of the university, argues that lawyers are trained to leave their beliefs and emotions at the door, to tuck their spirituality under wraps, and to bring purely intellectual discipline to hearings, client meetings and trials. That detached model, he believes, has drained lawyers — and the profession — of spirituality, meaning and humanity.

Hall’s definition of spirituality requires no deity or even religion. It does comprise a commitment to high values and what he calls “a search for the sacred.” That search can be for God, or simply for a deeper meaning in life. In Hall’s worldview, lawyers can be spiritual without knocking the separation of church and state off its constitutional pedestal.

“Though many lawyers are comfortable pursuing the ‘spirit of the law,’ most are not comfortable exploring the ‘spirit in the law,’” Hall writes in his new book, The Spiritual Revitalization of the Legal Profession: A Search for Sacred Rivers (Edwin Mellen Press, 2005). “The classical structure and theories of law do not recognize or give voice to non-intellectual aspects of human reality. Despite the strong influence of religion on the early development of law and their seemingly inseparable nature, various legal scholars and educators attempted to drain the spirit out of the structure and practice of law.”

With so many lawyers reporting dissatisfaction and burnout, Hall argues that a lack of spirituality is part of the problem. He also sees a connection between a spiritual void and higher-than-average rates of depression, suicide and substance abuse in the field, not to mention simpler ills such as rudeness, dishonesty and carelessness.

Lawyers, says Hall, exhibit “the very traits that the law abhors.” While the legal system was intended to create “order, balance and a sacred equilibrium within individuals and society,” he writes, it ends up contributing to “social ills among those who were its primary guardians.”

Hall concludes that if spirituality’s absence is part of the problem, its presence is part of the cure.

Lawyers who reveal their spiritual side might be more likely to see themselves as healers, argues Hall, to put compassion ahead of aggression, and civility ahead of war games. It’s a philosophy embraced by the holistic law movement, and presumably by thousands of lawyers who don’t join movements or wear nametags.

Family law is rich with examples. “In divorce cases it is not uncommon for each side to employ very demeaning, negative and hostile descriptions for the opposing party,” Hall writes. “Though this technique may contribute to a successful verdict, it comes at a high cost to the parties’ future relationship, especially when there are children involved. This process of draining people of their humanity in order to prevail in court is symbolic of how we have drained the law of its spiritual dimensions in order to sell it as a separate, rational and legitimate intellectual enterprise.”

The public might find a discussion of lawyers’ spirituality surprising or even far-fetched. Harris Interactive polls consistently rank clergymen twice as high as lawyers when it comes to prestige. But those who’ve worn both legal and clerical hats report the two fields are less divergent than they may seem.

Cloth Meets Court

Alice Hageman ’77, one of the first women ordained in the Presbyterian church, calls herself “a minister who happens to be a lawyer.” For 12 years, she prosecuted lawyers for professional misconduct for the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers of the Supreme Judicial Court. Much of her time was spent answering ethical questions — not unlike the dilemmas she faced in her earlier years as a minister. She always doled out discipline with compassion; one might say she ministered to the lawyers. “I didn’t yell at them and tell them what terrible people they were,” says Hageman, who would carry Kleenex into subpoena meetings. “People would cry — men and women — people [who] had wrecked their lives. They had spent all this time and money to get a law degree and it was going up in smoke. They had stolen money, they had neglected cases, they were drunks.”

From the counsel she offered to the legal papers she wrote, Hageman found parallels between law and ministry. “I found the work I did as a lawyer not inconsistent with the work I had done in the ministry,” she says.

Ronald Witmer ’75 of Witmer, Karp & Warner, a Boston-based firm specializing in family law, was a Methodist minister for about five years before heading to law school, and continued clergy work during his legal studies. When a co-op at Hale and Dorr in Boston led to a job offer, he made clear his desire to continue his church work. For a year, he worked in the firm’s litigation department and as an assistant minister in Rockland and Whitman, Massachusetts. His parishioners, suspicious of lawyers, wondered, “was I selling out?” And Witmer says some lawyers questioned whether a part-time minister was tough enough for law. Like anyone fighting a stereotype, he found himself debunking the myth of the mild-mannered minister. Other peers were baffled in general. “One senior partner at Hale and Dorr said, ‘I have some questions about you. I just wonder why you’re here and what you’re doing,’” he recounts.

It was at Hale and Dorr that Witmer became interested in divorce law, his primary focus today. “Ministers deal with people in chaos, people who need an advocate and a listener. Divorce lawyers do the same,” says Witmer. “It was a natural fit.”

Witmer says he neither announces nor hides his religious training, which is clearly outlined in his bio on the firm’s Web site. He figures some potential clients might be turned off by a sense that they “don’t want to go to confession with their lawyer.” Others may assume that he’s “not a barracuda.”

But he maintains that a congenial style ultimately serves the client best. “In the population’s mind, the tough aggressive divorce lawyer is desirable,” he says. “But it doesn’t always play well in front of a judge. Judges are not impressed by drama, hyperbole or withholding information.”

Witmer believes that bringing his spiritual self to the office helps his clients; believing that life has purpose and that humans have value keeps the job in perspective. “Religion helps prevent burnout in this profession,” Witmer says.

Early on, he feared his religious principles might be tested. “I thought I might be asked to do things I might find repulsive or inappropriate,” he says. “It hasn’t happened.” His idealism, however, has been tested. “It’s a struggle to not become cynical about human behavior,” he says.

Walking the Line

Occasionally lawyers do report instances when their legal duties directly challenge either religious or ethical principles. In “Heretics in the Temple of Law: The Promise and Peril of the Religious Lawyering Movement,” an article in the Journal of Law and Religion (2003-2004), Robert Vischer, an associate professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, mentions a Christian opposed to abortion who was required by a state ethics board to represent a minor seeking the procedure without parental consent. He also writes of a lawyer who opposed the death penalty but represented a death row client who did not want to use all available legal challenges, as well as a lawyer whose religion encourages advocacy for the oppressed but who was told to evict a low-income tenant. Vischer speaks frequently in Catholic forums and teaches a course called The Religious Lawyer. He says that, when working for a major law firm, he once declined to work on a case in which “I was asked to defend conduct I couldn’t bring myself to defend.”

Vischer defends the “religious lawyering movement” and challenges the notion that a lawyer’s “personal allegiances and affiliations should be irrelevant to her representation of clients.” But he also acknowledges that some lawyers could take the approach too far. “We not only have to address lawyers motivated by faith to open a legal aid office, but lawyers motivated by faith to pursue racial purity,” he writes. Ultimately, Vischer believes the free market safeguards lawyers who wear their ethics or religion openly. In other words, if clients don’t want a religious lawyer — or a lawyer who uses a guise of religion to support bigoted or otherwise repugnant beliefs — they won’t hire him.

A Sacred Space

Defining what constitutes a religious lawyer can be as murky as defining religion. Most would consider it someone who practices law and is deeply committed to the teachings of his or her faith. But Hall’s book makes a daring comparison: “To pursue the teaching and practice of law is the equivalent of joining the priesthood, or becoming a minister, rabbi or imam,” he writes.

That’s a shocking notion to most people, and should be, says Hall, who explains that he’s not referring to the role lawyers fulfill today, but the role they could fill. “That is the space we’ve given up,” he says. “This is the role that has been ordained for us in society, but we have given it up.”

Rabbis and pastors help people in their most trying moments, he says, adding, “that’s when many people end up in lawyers’ offices.”

It wouldn’t be a stretch to call Daniel Berman ’00 a religious lawyer. He recently left Mintz Levin in Boston to study to become a rabbi, and points to one particularly spiritual connection with a client — an Islamic woman who was seeking US citizenship. For this woman, who had fled persecution, Berman provided more than strictly legal counsel. “There was a real underlying sense of trying to find strength to move forward,” he says. “She was in a position of real brokenness. She needed someone to help her move from a state of brokenness to a state of health.”

Many rabbis, he adds, consider that kind of recovery process a religious event. “In some pro bono work, particularly the asylum case, you’re so much more than a lawyer,” he says. “You’re a counselor and a therapist. You’re trying to manage the clients’ needs.”

Pragmatically, Berman expects that his legal training will have prepared him for the rigors of the rabbinate. “If you can make your way through HIPAA [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act], a page of Talmud seems easy,” he says.

In addition, he thinks the listening skills necessary for law will come in handy as a rabbi. “Lawyers have a bad rap of only listening to themselves,” he says. “But you really need to be a good listener. To listen closely, to be empathetic, to care.”

That sense of caring is the essence of Hall’s book, and anchors the movements to inject more spirituality into the practice of law. After all, explains Hall, most lawyers choose their careers because they want to do good — regardless of whether ethics, religion, spirituality or personality drives them. “Though most lawyers will never define their work as spiritual, if they pursue it with their hearts as well as with their heads, then it becomes a sacred vocation.”

Gail Friedman is a freelance writer and a regular contributor to Northeastern Law Magazine.