Harvard Law School - Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

Page 21 text:

for certain individuals . . . . . . The attorney should not be anxious to file lawsuits against landlords. Where the tenant union isyoung and weak, filing an affirmative lawsuit is usually suicidal .... I do not mean to suggest that legal aid offices should not assist tenant unions, or that counseling a group of tenants will not on occasion preclude one from handling cases for individual tenants. Nor do I mean to imply that every lawyer should be willing to join a legal aid staff: save the clients from that. I mean simply to stress that when all the big causes are won and the master plans called for are put into opera- tion there will still be plenty of suffering which lawyers, acting for individuals through an imperfect legal process, can help amend. All of us have to be careful, I think, that our own commitment to help make a better life for large numbers of people, and our doubts about the efficacy of the legal process in achieving this end, do not comprise an intellectualized excuse for altogether opting out of involvement with persons whose own desperate sense of need is for an advocate now-change the system later. The most angry, aggressive, and effective legal aid lawyer I know is wont to muse that in five years we'll have accomplished this, and in ten years that, and it may take fifty years to gain still something else. When once asked by a frustrated student how in these days he could talk so calmly about victories so far off he replied very simply, with no piety whatsoever, that progress comes by relentlessly chipping away, and that chipping away for the poor was his life. We need more and more lawyers, I think, who can take defeat after defeat in little causes and keep going, with imagination and crafts- manship in each effort-perhaps, eventually, to win. I have a third concern. Wherever a lawyer may put himself along the line between serving the least of individual clients and planning for master changes affecting everybody, he is trained Cor should bel to devise remedies as well as state complaints. The most effective advocates usually do not file law suits without having a well conceived, reasonable decree virtually ready for submission to the court. By reasonable fa hateful lawyer's wordl I do not mean politically acceptable or even respectful of the attitudes of the adversaries. I mean, rather, a good faith effort to prescribe a solution, in the interest of one's client, that pays careful, attention to the consequences for all interests directly affected by the suit. CSuch elaboration of the remedy, as well as the complaint, was to me a most impressive feature of last yearfs student efforts for grade reform and other changes at the Law School.J For many in society, however, including law students, it is difficult to hold back an assertion of rights until they have a reasonable remedy to propose. The corrupt and oppressive quality of so many of our institutions is so obvious and so pervasive that it is far easier to root up and pull down than to plant and to build. So many prerogatives of so many decision-makers are usually involved before deliberations bring change that no wonder it often seems enough to challenge the status quo, leaving others to restructure and rebuild. Those who have .the temperament and courage for uncompromising efforts for change continually collide with those who have equally laudable qualities channeled into tireless efforts to help bring about the necessary compromise of differences for any true remedy. Whether one is a lawyer for those who wish to pull our institutions down or for those who wish to reform them with minimaldisruption, he will have an especially difficult task in keeping faith with his clients while trying to convince them about the im- portance of putting forth a well-conceived, reasona- ble remedy. But proposals for a remedy are inherent in the lawyer's role. To the extent that hostile emotions are stirred up by my concern for remedies as well as rights, or my conviction about the patience to chip away while the planners are mapping big changes, then this may be one measure of a decade gap. But fortunately for my own psyche I have heard the attitudes,I have expressed, and probably absorbed some of them myself, in many student gatherings here since I was privileged to return on the management side. In rereading what I have written I have asked myself in many instances whether I am being serious, cynical, judgmental, or indifferent. I donit honestly know, I am one who is haunted by the enormity and insolubility of problems and almost reverent with thanks for any progress that takes place. On one point, however, I am not ambivalent. I am terribly impressed by the law students I have come to know here during the past few years, and I share the anxiety students feel in trying to find a vocation which serves the right master. It would be nice if we could all be like Augustine-lead a profligate life for awhile yet eventually turn out to be a saint. But students have been given religion now in the sense of deep concern for all those whom society has neglected or overreached. For this concern the rest of society should be grateful and take heed, for I sense that after the students leave this place they will continue to keep faith with themselves and keep' calling upon the rest of us to render account, if only-and perhaps most importantly- in being honest with ourselves. I5

Page 20 text:

were virtually speechless when the secretary of one called for advice because her husband had been ar- rested for a Vietnam demonstration which tied up traffic at State and Madison. f'fWhat was the jerk doing that for? Call the desk sergeant and ask what to do. J A few things, however, began to register. Selma was especially important to me, not because I won- dered why I had not gone-that did not seriously suggest itself-but because quite obviously some people were willing to bear witness to and even give their lives for something that clearly had to be a top national priority, while I was a fungible mechanic whose direct efforts could best be justified by the need to sustain our great industrial economy. I do not at all belittle the need for lawyers to perform such functionsg oneis life is not cheapened simply by help- ing big industry and big government fight each other. But for me the thrill never came because my only re- ward, besides a bank account and friendly associates, was the awful, gloating smile of an appreciative Fat Ralph. His wishes seemed to be a terrible authority over my time as the Civil Rights Movement began to put our national and personal lives under judgment. So the unmortgaged among us, and even some of the rest, began to look for redemption and exhilara- tion in new employments, often in legal aid offices and hopefully on a leave-of-absence basis without salary cuts. After fewer than five years such hedging efforts now seem rather meager when compared with the substantial student interest today in legal aid careers and the far-reaching demands now heard from students and lawyers that law firms themselves must commit resources to lawyering in the public interest. Yet even more than lawyer delivery systems are called into question. Increasing numbers of law students are terribly concerned not merely about their vocational options as lawyers but about whether in good conscience they can take an oath of ad- mission to the bar-become an officer of the court in support of the legal system. I cannot spell out this sentiment further without either cheapening it for the students who feel it more deeply and re- sponsibly than I can express or romanticizing it for those who disparage such views. My job, rather, as the editors have charged me, is to lay bare some pres- ent-day reactions to the Law School by an alumnus whose classmates are just beginning to make partner in New York. I suppose that my principal reaction to life at the Law School these days is to note what to me has been a fast pace of change here during the past ten years-the addition of many young faculty members and of new and restructured courses and clinical 14 opportunities, the joint student-faculty quality of numerous endeavors, and the several changes in the grading system. But the pace of change, students say, is not fast enough. In this sense the Law School is a microcosm of what is going on almost everywhere in society-ferment toward a reshufliing of priorities. National or local issues, of course, are rarely easy to translate into onels personal priorities. Given my interests and abilities, a student asks, what is the business at hand for me today? How do I prepare to fit eventually into what? I offer three observations about how I see many students reacting to these questions in contrast, perhaps, to most of us who were educated in the years of Eisenhower. In the first place, unlike the students a decade ago, students today are obviously preoccupied with the need for radical changes in society. The move- ments- for civil rights, ending the war, and protecting consumers against industry-and the observable fact that an individual's efforts do make a difference in these respects-understandably dwarf the importance of spending one's time, one's vocation, on projects whose multiplier effect for the common good, if any, is hard to perceive. Little wonder that students join private law firms and industry with great reluctanceg they simply do not care to make Fat Ralph happy. This urge to join the most effective forces for change is exhilarating and makes it difficult for one to buckle down to day-to-day study of the technicalities of the law, even though effective law- yering requires considerable attention to doctrine and detail, whatever the cause. The emotional hurdle to becoming a legal craftsman was much less fre- quently before us a decade agog we were usually spared from the severity of a judgment that the times exempt no one from being careful and creative about his work product. Second, the urge today to participate in making big social changes is sometimes accompanied by an outlook which, in the extreme, can be distressing. I have heard some students and lawyers alike depre- cate the handling of divorces, consumer problems, or even evictions for the poor because each case only helps one person, or because the legal process is futile so why try. Note, for example, the following from a Tenant Union Guide prepared by The National Housing Law Project, Berkeley 09695, p. 8. . . . When a Legal Services lawyer is asked to assist an existing tenant union, how does he relate to the group? The basic principle underlying this relation- ship is that the primary goal is to sustain and strengthen the group. This principle subordi- nates test cases, legal victories, and even, on occasion, getting better housing or lower rents

Page 22 text:

.5 Q-'mug hr 7 xg R I ufi.s:wzGf1 ' 3 ' XR, 3 .-, ' I 3 1 ng, ' N N v. ,, f' '.:fJ D 7 'x 45, 4,-,4 Sf-rp, , ,. V , a If .ef v 64 .if ' , . ,Jas fu I . 2 I I, I ff ff! s-wx -Sv gun? N lie... U. I: ' R Ya I r I If I