North Carolina Lawyers - Learning from a long-dead Russian

By D. G. Martin
Posted Tuesday, March 20, 2007

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Chapel Hill, NC - “It occurred to him that what had seemed utterly impossible before-- that he had not lived the kind of life he should have--might in fact be true.”

I spent part of last week with a small group of respected North Carolina lawyers who took a long time pondering those words.

The passage came from the Russian author Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” Although Tolstoy wrote this short novel more than 100 years ago, the plight of its main character, Ivan Ilyich, found a sympathetic audience in the North Carolina lawyers.

Ivan, an important local court official, had climbed the professional and social ladder and judged himself successful. But when a strange illness forced him to deal with the reality of dying, he had other thoughts about his life.

“It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending. There was nothing to defend.

“‘But if that is so,’ he said to himself, ‘and I am leaving this life with the consciousness that I squandered all that was given me and it is impossible to rectify it -- what then?’ He lay on his back and began to pass his life in review in quite a new way.”

The group of lawyers talked to each other about their own worries about how they would view their own lives, looking backwards from their deathbeds. Knowing the professional and civic contributions of many of them, I smiled to myself, thinking they had no cause to worry.

But they were worrying nevertheless, worrying that, like Ivan Ilyich at his deathbed, they would see their own many accomplishments as “false” and their opportunities as “squandered.”

Lawyers are not the only ones of us who are worrying, or should be worrying, about living lives that will not measure up when death approaches.

The lawyers who met last week worried about more than their own deathbed reviews. They also worried about their profession, sharing some of the concerns of former Yale Law School Dean Tony Kronman, who wrote in his book, “The Lost Lawyer,” that the legal “profession now stands in danger of losing its soul.”

Kronman explains that most lawyers “hope that their work will be a source of satisfaction in itself…important enough to play a significant role in their fulfillment as human beings.”

But, says Kronman, there are “growing doubts about the capacity of a lawyer’s life to offer fulfillment….[E]arlier generations of American lawyers conceived their highest goal to be the attainment of a wisdom that lies beyond technique—a wisdom about human beings and their tangled affairs that anyone who wishes to provide real deliberative counsel must possess. They understood this wisdom to be a trait of character that one acquires only by becoming a person of good judgment, and not just an expert in the law. To those who shared this view it seemed obvious that a lawyer’s life could be deeply fulfilling…. But in the last generation this ideal has collapsed, and with it the professional self-confidence it once sustained.”

The North Carolina lawyers who gathered last week faced the challenges to their profession and the value of their own lives by studying the classics, the wisdom of sages from Socrates to Aquinas, to Tocqueville, to Tolstoy, to Martin Luther King—and by talking with each other about the relevance of these “great ideas” to themselves and the legal profession.

This gathering was the first in a series of programs for lawyers to be sponsored by the newly formed Center for Law and Humanities. Its organizers believe that “society needs humane lawyers to help lead it and promote a more just legal system. Lawyers need the humanities to be informed and inspired in their unique calling.”

We should wish them Godspeed!

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D.G. Martin is the host of UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch, which airs Sundays at 5:00 p.m.

Upcoming NC Bookwatch programs on UNC-TV at 5pm, Sundays

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William Leuchtenburg
The White House Looks South

April 8
Dot Jackson
Refuge

April 15
Art Chansky
Blue Blood

April 22
Mark Ethridge
Grievances