FEBRUARY 9, 2020 – When I was in law school, I had a legal-writing professor whose class was a real downer. At the outset of every session, he’d walk to the chalkboard, pick up a stick of chalk and write across the board, “THERE IS NO JUSTICE IN THIS WORLD.”
I thought this was a rather cynical, negative way to greet us first-year, eager-beaver-legal beagles determined to improve the world. Wasn’t our calling justice? Weren’t our profs supposed to be teaching, inspiring us to pursue justice in the world? Wasn’t the practice of law a noble profession, anchored to a platform of reasoned stare decisis and tethered to a framework of ever-evolving justice?
But no—here was a prof throwing ice water on the foundational notion that justice exists and that we were there to serve it, not to proclaim its non-existence.
One day years later, I was interviewing a young lawyer-to-be for a position in my firm. When I asked the perfunctory question, “So, why do you want to be a lawyer?” he answered, “To help people.” Whereupon, I asked rhetorically, “Help them be bigger assholes?” The young man was taken aback.
So was I. How had I allowed my ideals to be eroded? But then I recalled the professor’s axiom. I blamed him for having precipitated my long slide into cynicism.
Now as I reflect on my experiences, however, I see a hung jury on the question of justice. Based on good luck and bad, I’ve “won” matters when I should’ve lost, and “lost” when I should’ve won—in either respect, while justice was hovering close or completely AWOL.
In examining history or current events, I find that injustice shades and rages across every page of every chapter; likewise upon each page or screen of the daily news.
But hold the (smart)phone!
All is lost if we think there’s no justice in our system of justice. Worse than lost. We’re hosed if we surrender to the notion that “there is no justice in this world.”
As a matter of fact and logic, I’d argue that because injustice can still be identified as such, justice exists and even flourishes. After all, isn’t that which is unjust measured by the gauge of what is just?
All of this evokes a sense of morality, for which religions and philosophies offer ample explanations. Substantial but not coterminous overlap exists among these explanations. Within the American experience, however, several foundational sources rooted in the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment provide a framework by which we define ourselves as Americans; a framework that by way of historical consensus, we’ve organized ourselves into a more-or-less functioning, even prosperous, society.
However, it appears that like the magnetic north pole, perhaps our long-established framework is shifting. Much of what used to be just is now viewed as unjust and what was unjust is now deemed just. This transition is unsettling at best and revolutionary at worst, depending on where your head, your heart . . . and your wants and needs reside.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
