THE
GOOD
LAWYER
Representing
Justice is one of the most unusual
books about the law ever published. In it,
Yale law professors Judith Resnick and
Dennis Curtis consider the idea of justice,
and how that idea has been represented in
courthouses and plazas and art galleries
from Australia to Zambia. Readers will
discover images of courthouses of all sizes
and styles, as well as dozens of images of
Lady Justice, in a variety of poses and
dress.....
Of all
the representations of justice Resnick and
Curtis discovered in their far-ranging
travels, one stood out in their minds as the
most powerful. Before speaking on the
subject of courthouse architecture at an
Eighth Circuit conference in Minneapolis,
the two professors traveled through the
small northern Minnesota town of Grand
Marais, hard by Lake Superior and just
thirty-five miles from the Canadian border.
Visiting the town’s courthouse on a hill,
with its multi-story Ionic columns, they
asked the first staffer they found, who
turned out to be a probation officer, if any
icons of justice were displayed. The
probation officer immediately led them to
the second-floor courtroom and pointed to a
wall with a plaque and framed, well-worn,
corduroy jacket. The jacket belonged to the
county’s long-time public defender, James A.
Sommerness. In his more than two decades of
defending the poor, Sommerness —according to
the judge who smoke at an informal ceremony
honoring the public defender—“probably
appeared in this courtroom thousands of
times.” The judge described the lawyer as “a
top-notch advocate” noted for his
“professional kindness,” and said his work
“was a good thing, a thing we should do as a
community.” The plaque next to the jacket
commended Sommerness for his commitment to
the “human dignity of others” and his hard
work in “improving and delivering volunteer
legal assistance to the poor.” Resnick told
a reporter for the New York Times,
“We’ve seen a lot of representations of
justice over the years, but that one will
always be pretty hard to top.”
Resnick and Curtis argue in their book that
the ways in which governments choose to
represent justice “provide windows into
their aspirations.” Statues of Lady Justice
gracing courthouses from sea to shining sea
tells us that governments place importance
on the idea of judges dispensing equal
justice. The rarity of displays such as the
corduroy jacket in a northern Minnesota
courthouse honoring a defender of the poor
should make us ask whether government, and
society as a whole, values enough the idea
of seeking justice for all, regardless of
their station....
Seeking Quality in the
Practice of Law
by DOUGLAS O. LINDER and
NANCY LEVIT (Oxford
University Press, 2013)
The Good
Lawyer
About
The Good Lawyer
Preface
Introductory
Note
The
Good Lawyer is Courageous
The
Good Lawyer Values Others in the Legal
Community
The
Good Lawyer Uses Both Intuition and
Deliberative Thinking
The
Good Lawyer Thinks realistically About the
Future
The
Good Lawyer Serves the True Interests of
Clients
The
Good Lawyer Has Ample Willpower
The
Good Lawyer is Persuasive
Seeking
Quality
Quotes
Random
Facts
The
Happy Lawyer
Excerpt from Chapter 3:
The Good Lawyer Has a Passion for Justice