This past
Tuesday, our professor surprised my law school section by walking into our
first class, and asking us to take a moment of silence to reflect on 9/11. This wasn’t a class on criminal law, or
international security. This was Civil
Procedure. For those of you who intelligent enough to avoid law school, civil
procedure is the dreaded class that indoctrinates impressionable first year law
school students in all the procedures you need to know to sue someone, in
gruesome detail. At our first class, our
professor promised us that by the end of the term, we will know the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure like the back of our hands. He quickly
followed up with the warning: “But don’t
just read them; you might get to Rule
17, and then you will die.”
So why, in a
class that trains a new army of lawyers to aid and abet a society often called overly
litigious, about procedure so dry that we would die upon reading it, would my
professor bother to mention 9/11?
My Professor had
been teaching in California in 2001, so by the time his 8:30 Civil Procedure
rolled around, the events in New York were long past. He and his students arrived punctually, as one
would expect in a class on procedure, but after playing the video footage of
the attacks, he paused, and then asked them, “So what do you want to do? Should we even have class?”
After a moment, a
student with a military background stood up and said, “If we don’t have civil
procedure class, the terrorists win.” My
professor says he didn’t know quite what to do with that, but hearing no one
offering any objections, he acquiesced, and class began with cases talking
about the evidentiary support required to bring suit in federal court.
So why did the
student say the terrorists win if his classmates don’t learn how to sue people? Well, there’s perhaps no other class in law
school that allows one to take a stand against terrorism than one on civil
procedure. The whole point of civil
procedure—of law—is to offer an alternative method for us to resolve our
differences. If I feel wronged by you, I
submit to (hopefully) fair adjudication with the goal of just recompense. I don’t ram my car into yours. The rule of law is the repudiation of the mindless
violence the acts that day. The
rejection of the belief that might makes right and that because we can we
should.
The respect that
Catholicism, and Christianity, has for the rule of law—even the littlest law—is
remarkable. If a law is not specifically
unjust, we are under a strong obligation to follow it, down to the venerable
Vatican II Council specifically calling out speed limits as something we are
called to follow (Gaudium et Spes 30). For, “whoever resists authority opposes what God has appointed, and those
who oppose it will bring judgment upon themselves” (Romans 13:2).
But the
obligation to follow the law has a strong and equally powerful opposite—action
against a law when it truly is unjust. St. Augustine wrote, “an unjust law is no law
at all,” and as the
Fourth Lateran Council says, “He who acts against his conscience loses his
soul.” Yet as Catholics, if we don’t like a law, we
can’t just shrug our shoulders, pretend it doesn’t exist, and ignore it. Instead, if our conscience points out an injustice
in our society—especially one that the authority that Romans tells us has been
appointed by God—we have a duty to fight it with all our hearts.
In her welcome
address, our Dean told us that in teaching us law, my school is giving each of
us a tool of great power. How are we
going to use it? These twin
principles—upholding just laws and fighting against injustice—this is why I am
studying to be a lawyer. I study to
ensure that we are a society of order, and that the events of 9/11 are a
catastrophe, not an everyday occurrence.
I learn law to ensure we are a society of justice—that the last, the
littlest, and the least are protected no matter the circumstances.
I am studying to
be a lawyer so that I can live, more fully, a Catholic.
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