The people of Haiti need many things now. Water. Food. Medicine. Heavy equipment. It’s a long list. Lawyers aren’t on it. Yesterday, I tried to make my point via twit :
The point is that emergent desperation calls for certain abilities. Think Abraham Maslow. It breaks my heart that I, as a lawyer, cannot offer the help that people need in their desperation. I cannot ease their pain. I cannot feed the hungry children. I cannot build them shelter. I cannot even capture the suffering on film so that the rest of the world can see the pain. I am but a lawyer. There are times when my limitations are manifest. This is such a time.
Criminal defense lawyers, by and large, feel that we bring something critically important to a functioning society, protecting the least powerful from the most. We do this because we feel a desire, a need, to contribute to others. Transactional lawyers don’t share this feeling. To close a big multinational billion dollar deal rarely involves any desire to serve their fellow man. It’s just about money. Money doesn’t motivate criminal defense lawyers. If that’s what motivates you, then criminal defense is not likely to be your best field of endeavor. You will be disappointed.
While my arms and legs still work to some extent, I could offer the people of Haiti no more than a helping hand to life the rubble off buried bodies. It’s something, but no different than what any other laborer could offer. My specialization adds nothing at the moment. There are times, in emerging nations, when lawyers can assist in the higher order function of bringing a rational legal system, a means of justice or dispute resolution, together. But when people are suffering in pain, thirst and hunger, this seems trivial. The needs are so basic and critical, and I have nothing to offer.
In the early years of my career, I pumped myself up by thinking of the platitudes that support the existence of the legal system and the value of the law. It took a while before I had been around long enough to be able to turn around and look back at my legacy. I saw piles of paper. There were, of course, people whose lives I had saved, and I felt good about it. There was law that came about as a result of my efforts, and I felt good about it. There were bad cops taken off the street because of me, and I felt good about it. It wasn’t a wasted life by any means.
But as I look at the devastation in Haiti, it reminds me of a long-standing, nagging doubt about my choice of career. I cannot jump into the suffering and do anything meaningful to help.
Obviously, lawyers serve an important function. No need for some kid lawyer to be so presumptuous as to explain to me what we do and its value. But when there are people in pain who need help, I want to be capable of providing it. I want to be able to do whatever is needed to help others. No one in Haiti is calling for the United States to send over its lawyers.
Notice how important Doctors Without Borders is in a disaster. Notice there is no Lawyers Without Borders?Naturally, there were numerous responses that there are indeed organizations bearing the name Lawyers Without Borders. Even in French, there is a group of that name. It wasn’t about the name. Anyone who repeats their responses here will be banned for life. Similarly, anyone who wants to inform me that it’s called a “tweet” rather than “twit” will be banned for life. You are slaves to the banal and lack the ability to see beyond the literal.
The point is that emergent desperation calls for certain abilities. Think Abraham Maslow. It breaks my heart that I, as a lawyer, cannot offer the help that people need in their desperation. I cannot ease their pain. I cannot feed the hungry children. I cannot build them shelter. I cannot even capture the suffering on film so that the rest of the world can see the pain. I am but a lawyer. There are times when my limitations are manifest. This is such a time.
Criminal defense lawyers, by and large, feel that we bring something critically important to a functioning society, protecting the least powerful from the most. We do this because we feel a desire, a need, to contribute to others. Transactional lawyers don’t share this feeling. To close a big multinational billion dollar deal rarely involves any desire to serve their fellow man. It’s just about money. Money doesn’t motivate criminal defense lawyers. If that’s what motivates you, then criminal defense is not likely to be your best field of endeavor. You will be disappointed.
While my arms and legs still work to some extent, I could offer the people of Haiti no more than a helping hand to life the rubble off buried bodies. It’s something, but no different than what any other laborer could offer. My specialization adds nothing at the moment. There are times, in emerging nations, when lawyers can assist in the higher order function of bringing a rational legal system, a means of justice or dispute resolution, together. But when people are suffering in pain, thirst and hunger, this seems trivial. The needs are so basic and critical, and I have nothing to offer.
In the early years of my career, I pumped myself up by thinking of the platitudes that support the existence of the legal system and the value of the law. It took a while before I had been around long enough to be able to turn around and look back at my legacy. I saw piles of paper. There were, of course, people whose lives I had saved, and I felt good about it. There was law that came about as a result of my efforts, and I felt good about it. There were bad cops taken off the street because of me, and I felt good about it. It wasn’t a wasted life by any means.
But as I look at the devastation in Haiti, it reminds me of a long-standing, nagging doubt about my choice of career. I cannot jump into the suffering and do anything meaningful to help.
Obviously, lawyers serve an important function. No need for some kid lawyer to be so presumptuous as to explain to me what we do and its value. But when there are people in pain who need help, I want to be capable of providing it. I want to be able to do whatever is needed to help others. No one in Haiti is calling for the United States to send over its lawyers.
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I had the exact same thought about lawyers being able to bring nothing to the table in a disaster like this. I wish more than ever I’d gone to med school.
Reminds me of a cartoon I saw many years ago: journalists at a news conference asking the Joint Chiefs of Staff how long it would take to come back from a nuclear war. One of them stated “30 years but that’s only if no lawyers survive.”
When I saw your whatever it’s called in the 140, I assumed it was sardonic. So the elaboration here is a good thing.
I’ve had the same reaction over the years and again this week. You’ll perhaps lambaste me for saying this, but in some ways, it’s not bad to recognize the limits on competence, abilities and importance.
Those of us who dare to represent people in the justice system necessarily bring outsized egos to our work lives. Being humbled by disaster or being awed by the universe serve to remind that it’s not very much about me.
So given that all I have are an aging body thousands of miles away and profound wealth by comparison to those living in Haiti, the only choices are give money or simply ignore it. And so we give.
Yes, I would love to be a young person on the scene doing the actual rescue work or a skilled trauma surgeon who dropped in to provide timely and urgently needed care. I’m not.
When one of your struggling clients is facing the misguided wrath of an out-of-control criminal justice system, the young rescuer and trauma surgeon are as helpless as we are in Haiti. That’s the trade, Hoss. And by the way, I don’t know about you, but I have the distinct notion that those of us who are good advocates would be poorly suited by temperament to be healers.
Most of us have done ok. So time to give up the big screen TV we were about to buy and donate to insure those that can help have the resources.
No one in Haiti is calling for the United States to send over its lawyers.
Not YET, but that’s no cause for self-pity.
In addition to being a lawyer, I’m also a certified lifeguard, and have been for about 20 years. (So, first point: if you’d like to have skills that more immediately affect people’s corporeal health, there’s nothing about being a lawyer that should stop you. You can have multiple skillsets.)
As part of lifeguard and related first aid training you learn a lot about the mechanics of a rescue. If someone drowns, you don’t throw a doctor into the pool. In an emergency you have a chain of rescuers, beginning with citizen responders, then first responders, professional rescuers, paramedics/EMTs, THEN doctors. Like Maslow suggested, you don’t take on everything at once. You take on the immediate, pressing needs with the skillsets needed, and then apply specialized ones when the time is right.
My point is that while there may be no need to airlift lawyers, as lawyers, in TODAY, we will be needed tomorrow. While right now Haiti’s problems may require different skills than what we have to offer as lawyers, once this immediate crisis has passed, Haiti will be in great need of stabilizing as a society for its people’s continued survival. THIS is the work that we, as lawyers, know how to do. What organizations like Avocats Sans Frontiers do. And what shaken societies will come to desperately need as much as they need different skills today.
So, yes, right now no one may be calling for us. But you can wait until they do, and they will, or if you don’t want to wait, and if bare labor is all that’s needed right now, what’s stopping you from providing it? Our limbs, our brains, and our compassion don’t all become useless once we get our licenses, unless we let them.
It’s the double edged sword of training in a specific profession, when you need a lawyer no one else is going to cut it and when you don’t need a lawyer you just don’t need a lawyer. Doctors are in a similar situation when people aren’t sick.
It’s a fair observation to point out that some skills respond to certain needs better than others.
This wouldn’t be one of those times.
I *am* challenging your position, but I don’t think it’s belligerent to say that
1) To the extent that you lament that lawyer skills are unhelpful at times like these, “times like these” has a broader meaning than just in the immediate few days after the earthquake. The healing will be a long term project, and the roles for lawyers to play in that process are critically important. Someone hungry/hurt/homeless because of an earthquake is just as badly off as someone hungry/hurt/homeless as a result of social unrest. We can do a lot to avoid the latter, and we’ll need to.
2) To the extent that you lament that lawyering skills are not the right ones to solve the immediate hungry/hurt/homeless problem, you are NOT useless. Either get the skills you wish you had, or just be helpful labor. This crisis doesn’t need to pass you by just because you’re a lawyer. So what if it doesn’t take a brilliant motion or witness examination or some other finely-honed lawyer skill. You are a capable, caring, intelligent person (and perhaps even more so as a result of your legal experience). If you want to do something, you still can.
Perhaps I misread you (although I don’t think so), and perhaps I am slightly sensitive vis a vis ASF. I was deeply touched by my encounter with them in Africa last year and came away with the strong sense of how important lawyers are to preventing and remedying humanitarian crises. So if there is “belligerence” in my tone it might be because I really don’t think organizations like that should be so easily dismissed simply because they don’t physically rememdy the hungry/hurt/homeless problems.
But ultimately I’d hope my comments to be viewed as empowering. Everything you mourn not doing, you can do. So do it!
I hear ya but I think there is a need for lawyers. Haitian immigrants in this country could sure use some help (esp. once their grace period wears off). Haiti could use some rule-of-law expertise in the long run, too, and lawyers are always happy to help with that. Bar associations and law firms are in a great position to raise money for causes, and I’m sure they will feel the pull towards doing good.
That may not be the same thing as pulling bodies out of rubble. It might not feel like enough. “No one can do everything, but everyone can do something.”
Also, think about why they have that rubble to begin with — no safety regs, no building codes.
Your post reminds me, too, of the LA riots. I sat comfortably listening in the midwest. Lawyers were there to help people, but nobody else was standing up. It made quite an impression on me, enough that I decided to go to law school around that time.
As lame a “defense” of lawyers as Cathy’s was child-like in its naiveté.
Child-like, yet belligerent.
At the Risk of Sounding Like a “Slacktivist” . . .
Until today, last week’s earthquake in Haiti had me sitting on the sidelines again. Sure, I have a general feeling of sadness for the people suffering through the aftermath of the earthquake, but by and large, I am mostly ambivalent. Though I didn’t …
My father likes to point out when such comparisons are made that while lawyers were drafting the US Constitution, doctors were still bleeding patients with leeches.
I think you may dismiss Anne’s point too lightly about “why they have that rubble to begin with — no safety regs, no building codes.” Hard to argue with that. 6.8 hits San Francisco and 60 people die. 7.0 hits Haiti and the death toll hits six figures. That ain’t nothing.
I hoped that it was clear from the original post, though it’s been largely ignored in the comments, that I’m not suggesting that lawyers serve no purpose in society. We have our place, and make certain contributions. That place, and those contributions, however, leave us out of helping others who have fundamental needs. Your father’s example, for instance, is interesting, but fails to address the fact that the dying person needed medical care, even if only bleedin by leeches, rather than rancorous debate to survive. It might not be great medical care, but it had a greater chance of easing the dying man’s suffering than a lengthy discussion of the commerce clause.
An interesting note as to Haiti is that it had attempted to enact safety regs and building codes that would cause a lawyer’s chest to swell with pride, but they lacked the funding and basic safety standards were routinely ignored by a population that had little concern for the niceties of governmental oversight. Poor people build whatever shelter they can. If it were up to lawyers, and code enforcement took precedence over survival, how many Haitians would have died from exposure rather than earthquake?
New lawyers tend to suffer from an untainted belief in platitudes, something of a messiah syndrome, believing that they are some sort of savior. They believe this to justify their choice of career, and to give them a reason to wake up in the morning. Some of us who have spent too many years watching a system produce far less “justice” than the platitudes suggest find them empty. Our hope is to try to keep us from sinking further away from justice. It’s not quite what we had in mind when we started, which is why we suffer a feeling of emptiness when we see suffering and can’t do anything to help.
As a last point, consider: The only comments that suggest difficulty with my post come from a non-lawyer, a non-practicing lawyer or a lawyer with about 12 minutes experience. Not a single practicing lawyer with any experience doesn’t understand the sense of uselessness in a disaster. What does that tell you?
I understand your sense of uselessness in the face of the Haitian tragedy, Scott, and I don’t know that I suggested a “problem” with your post. I do sense some defensiveness, though, in your response.
Do you suppose part of the reason Haitian building regs weren’t enforced might be an underdeveloped legal system in addition to gross poverty? Just a thought. If they had regs in place as you say, maybe the problem was that the lawyers they had did a crappy job? If so, perhaps lawyers aren’t useless, just responsible?
I don’t think it’s a matter of defensiveness, but rather a bit of annoyance. The post didn’t ask a question, but offered a statement, and to have that statement questioned by people for whom it’s not intended is, well, annoying. I don’t expect non-lawyers to understand the feeling, and consequently don’t expect non-lawyers to suggest how lawyers should feel about it. I expect them to realize that it’s not about them.
As for your question on the building codes, the answer is not even close. When there’s no money to feed people, creating and enforcing building codes isn’t a priority. This has nothing whatsoever to do with lawyers.
They’ll eventually need lawyers.
There’s a comforting thought.