Remaining True to Law: Justice Is Done One Task at a Time
This year’s Ross Essay Contest—asking ABA members to address the topic “Why do you believe the legal profession is the greatest profession in the world?”—brought in so many good entries that we have several we want to share. The contest and $5,000 grand prize is supported by a trust established in the 1930s by the late Judge Erskine M. Ross of Los Angeles. The contest is administered by the ABA Journal. A winner will be announced and published in the August magazine.
Here’s another of this year’s finalists:
I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the law for 40 years. I fell in love in 1968, walking to law school in Washington, D.C., past looted stores and over shattered glass. Before that April the concern about conflict and injustice that had led me to choose law had been mostly academic, but the riots that marred my senior year were palpable evidence of both their complexity and their importance. Looking at the Capitol dome from the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court building each morning I knew that the three years of work and worry had been worth it. Difficult and frightening as law school had often been, I knew I had made the right choice.
I have spent four decades living with that commitment. At times it has been glorious, at times heartbreaking. Often it has been merely tedious. The greatest frustration for a lawyer who sets out to save the world is that the world so seldom gives you opportunities to save it—at least not opportunities you can recognize. For long periods, much like a cheated spouse, I could not have uttered the words love and the law in the same sentence. Mr. Bumble’s “the law is a ass, a idiot” became one of my favorite quotes. Personal satisfaction became a distant, almost nonexistent, second to earning a living—and even that was often difficult.
Being a lawyer is much like any commitment: Remaining true to the relationship has its rewards, though not always the ones you expect. The law has disappointed me at least as often as it has made me glad. I have had successes, but I have also seen injustices committed in the law’s name and have had to live with the frustrating realization that my skills were not adequate to the task of prevention or redress.
I have seen better lawyers than I—litigators, legislators, counselors, community leaders—suffer the same failure and cope with the same realization. As the scope and focus of my practice have been narrowed and defined by the kinds of clients who have come to me and the modest successes I have had (and by the failures), I have increasingly understood the complexity and depth of the problems I once hoped to solve. Living life tends to make one a realist. But I have also increasingly understood the importance of accomplishing justice one task at a time, whether the challenge be big or small, societal or individual, precedential or of significance only to one small person who calls you “my lawyer.”
I felt very alone in my commitment the day I left law school. Even in those days the public’s impression of lawyers was not flattering. But I need not have worried. Throughout four decades of practice I have been inspired and challenged by the creativity, and often the courage, of the many lawyers who have made the same commitment and who often live up to it with greater sacrifice, and thankfully with greater success, than I—those whose commitment is never suffocated by difficulty or failure. I speak not only of those who fight for causes but of those who defend what often appears indefensible; of those who put order into our civil affairs, from the humblest will to the largest merger.
Lawyers work to strengthen our relationships, to resolve conflicts, to achieve justice. They are rarely credited when they succeed and almost always derided when they fail. But they never stop trying. I know. I’ve been watching for 40 years.
Why do I think the law is the greatest profession? Because it gives me hope.
Ralph Ehlinger is a solo practitioner in Germantown, Wis.
