The Last, the Littlest, the Least

One of my favorite parts about law school is the quality of speakers that come here every day.  Mere intelligence or understanding of the law is not sufficient to be an effective lawyer; you have to be able to communicate that understanding to others in a convincing manner.  Most of the lawyers who get invited to speak at Harvard Law School are rather good at that.  A few weeks ago, I heard one of the most inspiring talks I’ve ever heard by Bryan Stevenson (To give you an idea, it’s the only time I’ve seen Harvard Law School students give a standing ovation.  For a similar talk, go here). One of the points he mentioned was that as a society, we have to not only focus on the “bright and dazzly things” but also the dark and difficult things it’s just easier not to worry about.

This brings me it to the second principle I identified in my post two weeks ago: fighting injustice.  Central to the Catholic understanding of justice is the relation of privilege and powerlessness.  Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles once quoted a common saying attributed most often to Ghandi: "Any society, any nation, is judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members; the last, the least, the littlest.” The social justice tradition of the Catholic Church has long admitted the necessity of a “preferential option for the poor” (as many of the Catholic and Jesuit scholars at Georgetown Law reminded Paul Ryan in a letter that can only be described as snarky on occasion of his visit to their campus). 

The nature of our Common Law system encourages social realities to become legal ones.  For instance, it’s normally very hard to get an injunction—a Court order to prohibit or force someone to do something under pain of fine or imprisonment.  Courts much prefer to award money damages.  However, there is an exception to this when the Courts look at anything to do with land. Land (technically any real property) has held a special place in jurisprudence.  Whether you want to attribute it to some subjective factor that makes land irreplaceable, the historic tie-up of wealth in land, or the first lawyers in England being landowners, the law has disregarded economists’ insistence that land is able to be objectively valued, and will generally not award money damages in land related cases, but rather make people move on and off or even demolish their homes before considering any other remedy to disagreements. 

It’s factors like this that make what lawyers do in courtrooms and in legislative chambers so important.  Our legal system, without people like Bryan Stephenson who fight for the littlest among us, create institutions that favor people already privileged by the societies we live in.  We live in a world in which 50-60% of persons of color in urban communities are in jail, in prison, on probation, or parole.  In the states of the old South, a defendant is 22 times more likely to receive a guilty verdict if the defendant is black as opposed to white.  And habits such as these find their way into law.  Alabama’s Constitution still technically mandates segregated schools, and prohibits “idiots” and LGBT persons from voting.

As Catholics, we cannot close our eyes to the injustice that surrounds us daily.  Certainly, as a lawyer I hope to fight injustice is another that we can be a society of laws, but the relation between law and society is not one way.  Every Catholic has a duty to open his or her eyes to make sure every act keeps at its center what was the central part of Jesus’ ministry—the last, the littlest, and the least.