For The Defense, November 2012 - DRI Today

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