the
challenges of the rigorous law school curriculum. At the
same time, the Rollins curriculum is designed to afford
the student a firm foundation that will enable one to function both as a
student of law and as a legal practitioner in the context of that unique
quality.
Lawyers play an extraordinary role in the life of the United States,
the role of reform and conscience. As a whole, law is a conservative
profession in the United States as elsewhere. But with us it has always
had a reforming, even a crusading, streak. That is a necessary
consequence of the American political system.
We live under a written constitution, an 18th century document that
in a few thousand words tried to lay down permanent rules for the
government of a continental country. Without constant reinterpretation,
that Constitution would long since have proved an unbearable
straitjacket. The process of amendment is too awkward to provide the
necessary flexibility. And so we have relied on our judges to make old
words meaningful in a rapidly changing society.
Politics Legalized
As we all know, the result has been to legalize our politics.
Tocqueville put it a century ago that every political question in the
United States is eventually made a legal question. Even slavery, the
issue that helped to bring on our most terrible war, was framed in a
lawsuit: the Dred Scott case.
Another way of putting it is to say that, in the United States more
than anywhere, law is an instrument of social change. What politicians,
union leaders, and social reformers do to achieve change without
revolution in other societies, lawyers do in ours. It would be
unimaginable, for example, in Britain for lawsuits to alter the entire
basis of race relations or of legislative representation--as they have
done in the United States.
Not many American lawyers get to argue great constitutional causes in
the Supreme Court. But the profession feels the consequences in any
case--the consequences of a system in which political and social and
even economic questions are framed in legal terms.
American legal education, for example, is much more challenging than
that of most countries, probing deeper into the intellectual basis of
the legal process and into the social significance of the results.
American law schools are an infinitely greater source of public ideas
and public servants. And all of that must relate to the broader
responsibilities of the American profession.
PROTECTION OF BASIC FREEDOMS
Our constitutional scheme also gives lawyers responsibility for
protecting individual freedom that would rest with others elsewhere--for
instance, with parliamentarians in Britain. It is no accident that
English anthologists, when they look for great judicial defenses of
freedom, are more likely to quote American judges such as Holmes and
Brandeis than their own judges.
It was a New York lawyer, Charles Evans Hughes, who in 1921 protested
the exclusion of five Socialist members from the New York state
assembly, thus helping to change the red-baiting climate of the country.
It was a handful of Washington lawyers in the 1950s who gradually
brought the country to its senses in the hunt for security risks. And it
was a Supreme Court decision, Brown vs. the Board of Education in 1959,
that gave legal muscle to the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther
King.
There is certainly no shortage of reforming and crusading lawyers in
the United States today. But seen in the broad spectrum, the social
responsibility of the American legal system, at its best, characterizes
the entire legal profession.
Those who seek the law as a career in this nation should be guided by
the rigorous demands and social calling of that profession, especially
in the context of that role in the United States.
