For The Defense, November 2012 - DRI Today
For The Defense, November 2012 - DRI Today
For The Defense, November 2012 - DRI Today
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On <strong>The</strong> Record<br />
Embracing the Process of Transformation<br />
<strong>DRI</strong> and the 21st Century Lawyer<br />
By Mary Massaron Ross, <strong>DRI</strong> President<br />
Lawyer and former president of Dartmouth College<br />
James O. Freedman said, “Both strands of learning,<br />
the literary and the legal, concern themselves with the<br />
dilemma of the human condition.” According to Freedman,<br />
the “consequences of individual decisions and<br />
actions, the tolerance of conflicting views, the balancing<br />
of justice and mercy, freedom and authority… are<br />
the grist of the novelist’s imagination, the poet’s vision,<br />
the essayist’s insight, no less than a lawyer’s craft.” I<br />
have always believed, along with Justice Felix Frankfurter,<br />
that the “best way to come to the study of law is to<br />
come to the study of law as a well-read person.” <strong>The</strong> law,<br />
like great literature, happens at the intersection of the<br />
abstract and the particular, the logical and the intuitive,<br />
the uniform and the unique. According to William Styron,<br />
“A good book should leave you… slightly exhausted<br />
at the end. You live several lives while reading it.” And<br />
it is just this process that makes the world of books so<br />
helpful to those of us trying to deepen our understanding<br />
of people and of this global world.<br />
Since childhood, I have spent many of my happiest<br />
hours curled up in a chair reading. If you visit my<br />
home in the Detroit area, you will see books spilling<br />
out of bookcases, stacked on end tables, and occasionally<br />
piled on the floor. If you stop by my office, the<br />
books are two-deep on the shelves that line several of the<br />
walls. And when the guards check my purse as I enter a<br />
courthouse or go through the airport security line, they<br />
inevitably see a Kindle (with several hundred books<br />
downloaded on it) as well as whatever paperback book I<br />
am currently reading. <strong>The</strong> novels of Tolstoy, Hardy, Austen,<br />
Eliot, Dickens, Cervantes, James, Twain, Cather,<br />
Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Ellison, and many more have given<br />
me insight into the human condition and allowed me to<br />
experience aspects of life that I would never otherwise<br />
have understood.<br />
When I read news accounts about the war in Afghanistan,<br />
or the problems in Pakistan, or the now- turbulent<br />
and dangerous Arab Spring, or issues involving the children<br />
of British immigrants in London and their difficulties,<br />
I learn the answer to basic journalistic questions:<br />
who, where, when, what, and why. But I often turn to<br />
novels written by authors from these places to deepen<br />
my understanding. I want to know more than who is<br />
doing what to whom at a particular moment in time. If<br />
I don’t know much about the history and the culture as<br />
it has shaped the ways of thinking of those who live in<br />
the places discussed in the news, I won’t be able to truly<br />
fathom what is happening.<br />
I never fully grasped some of the tensions within Israel<br />
until I read books by Amos Oz. Nor did I understand<br />
apartheid as seen by Afrikaners and those resisting apartheid<br />
until I read the novels of Nadine Gordimer and Nelson<br />
Mandela’s autobiography. Milan Kundera and Joseph<br />
Skvorecky gave me fascinating glimpses of life in the<br />
Czech Republic under the communist regime. And I had<br />
an even better sense of the Czech world-view when I finished<br />
reading <strong>The</strong> Good Soldier Svejk by Jarislav Hasek, a<br />
comic tale of a hapless Czech soldier who was impressed<br />
into service in the Austrian army during World War I and<br />
forced to deal with the bureaucracy of an occupying regime.<br />
Robertson Davies, Mordecai Richler, Alice Munro,<br />
and Jane Urquhart taught me something about Canada.<br />
I learned about Germany in part through the novels of<br />
Gunter Grass, Thomas Mann, and Herta Muller. When<br />
Tip O’Neill said “All politics is local,” he might have also<br />
been talking the historic backdrop and cultural underpinnings<br />
that shape each of our world views.<br />
An understanding of the human condition as it exists<br />
in the many locales of our global world is essential for<br />
the twenty- first century lawyer, where clients, jurors,<br />
and judges are increasingly diverse. To be sure, the core<br />
principles of advocacy have not changed since the days<br />
of Cicero and Quintilian and Aristotle, whose works can<br />
still be studied for lessons in how to argue and present<br />
a case. Logical reasoning, the ability to evoke empathy,<br />
and a facility with words are as essential to outstanding<br />
advocacy today as when these classics were written. <strong>The</strong><br />
advice to be gleaned from them remains as useful today<br />
as it was centuries ago when Cicero argued on behalf of<br />
his clients at trials in the Roman <strong>For</strong>um. But advocates<br />
cannot follow this advice without a deep understanding<br />
of the world views of those from many different cultures.<br />
And however much the essential verities of advocacy<br />
and persuasion remain the same, the legal world is<br />
in the process of transformation in other ways as well.<br />
Naguib Mahfouz, an Egyptian author and winner of<br />
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, said in one of his<br />
many books, “It seems to me as though there is no reality<br />
in the world except for change.” I agree. Although my<br />
professional life spans only a few decades, I can recall<br />
when the address for each letter—to a client or a court—<br />
had to be typed onto the envelope no matter how many<br />
On <strong>The</strong> Record, continued on page 6<br />
<strong>For</strong> <strong>The</strong> <strong>Defense</strong> ■ <strong>November</strong> <strong>2012</strong> ■ 1