Mission, Vocation, and Ethics: A Reflection on The Lawyer’s Conscience

This is the third in a series of three blog posts this week by Marquette law faculty on a new book.

The Lawyer's Conscience - A History of American Lawyer EthicsAs a Catholic priest and member of the Society of Jesus (that is, the Jesuits), my life is defined by mission. I may be a professor, a campus minister, even a lawyer, but these professional lives are founded upon—and to an extent dependent upon—that deeper vocational life. While there has been a role for personal judgment and discretion, specific performance of any job comes only subsequent to the religious judgment and discernment of my major superior, who formally “missions” every Jesuit to his particular assignment. I am not merely wafting through whatever I fancy or have some minimal technical proficiency in, and what makes me “good” (or not) stems not from proficiency but from the fact of mission. Vocation begets mission begets profession.

I am put in mind of this dynamic as I reflect upon Michael S. Ariens’s recently published The Lawyer’s Conscience: A History of American Lawyer Ethics (University of Kansas Press 2022). Ariens surveys the history of how lawyers imagined themselves and how competing images have been synthesized into a multifaceted, perhaps self-contradictory conception of the modern lawyer. Throughout this survey, from the eve of the American Revolution to the crises of the early 21st century, the core tension has always revolved around this same dynamic: what is the vocation of the lawyer, and, thus, what is the lawyer’s mission, and how does any of this define the lawyer’s profession?

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Professor Michael Ariens’s New Book as a Teaching Tool

This is the second in a series of three blog posts this week by Marquette law faculty on a new book.

The Lawyer's Conscience - A History of American Lawyer EthicsIn The Lawyer’s Conscience: A History of American Lawyer Ethics (University of Kansas Press 2022), Professor Michael Ariens provides a history of lawyer ethics and identifies problems that make it difficult for modern lawyers to live up to the ideals of an ethical lawyer. Conceptions of the ideal lawyer have changed from the late 1700s to the present day, and the book provides historical examples of lawyer ideals at different points in history. Broadly speaking, the historic honorable lawyer was motivated primarily by a sense of duty to conscience and regard for the public good. The honorable lawyer was committed to serve as a professional and did not attach undue importance to matters such as fees or client preference.

Through classroom discussions in courses such as The Law Governing Lawyers and Professional Identity Formation (and even Legal Writing and Research), I know that students yearn to practice in an age when the public perceived lawyers as esteemed community members safeguarding the public good. The Lawyer’s Conscience has inspired me to bring more historical perspective into these discussions. I want my students to know, for example, that the problem of lawyer misuse of power is not new and not reserved for the modern age, even if modern developments have introduced new and different problems. For a very long time, lawyers have had to embody conflicting roles, serving as advocate and counselor but also as an officer of the court and legal system reformer.

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Michael Ariens—Law School Class of ’82—Is a Deep and Deft Thinker

This is the first in a series of three blog posts this week by Marquette law faculty on a new book.

The Lawyer's Conscience - A History of American Lawyer EthicsOver a distinguished career Professor Michael S. Ariens of St. Mary’s University has made rich contributions to the scholarship devoted to American constitutional law, legal history, his adoptive home state of Texas, navigating the challenges of law school, and, central for our purposes, the practice of law and the American legal profession.

Professor Ariens’s new volume—The Lawyer’s Conscience: A History of American Legal Ethics (University Press of Kansas 2022)—continues a theme that animates much of his recent scholarship. Put succinctly, that theme is this: The American legal profession has veered off course. It has done so, according to Ariens, in a host of ways. Among them, he contends, are these:

  • Commitment to clients has supplanted commitment to the public good.
  • The pursuit of profit-maximization has transformed the enterprise from a profession into a business.
  • The day-to-day touchstones of (first) honor and (then) conscience that impelled lawyers up through the middle of the twentieth century have melted away, replaced for the typical lawyer by an impoverished set of minimum standards of conduct promulgated by the American Bar Association in the early 1980s.
  • Independence from client interests—independence that enabled lawyers and their firms to both be and be perceived as being separate from those client interests—has been supplanted by a sort of shotgun marriage that leaves today’s law firms unable or unwilling to maintain appropriate distance from client interests.
  • A profession whose members once shared a common vision of what it means to be a lawyer and found ways to speak in something of a unified voice has “fractured,” creating the sorts of factions James Madison described in Federalist 10. Such fracture, Ariens submits, has dissolved this once-unified vision and rendered it virtually impossible to achieve meaningful consensus on principles that matter.
Continue ReadingMichael Ariens—Law School Class of ’82—Is a Deep and Deft Thinker