By Talmage Boston on April 25, 2012
Lawyers with doubts about the legal profession’s value in the American scheme of things need look no farther than Raising the Bar: The Crucial Role of the Lawyer in Society (TexasBarBooks 2012). The book is one lawyer’s vision of what the profession has been, is now, and can be in the future, if we focus on the contributions lawyers have made in both the distant and recent past, in “raising the bar” for the good of American society. Consider the following questions:
Who is the greatest hero in American history?
Answer: A consummate trial and appellate attorney from Springfield, Illinois, who applied the communication, advocacy, empathy, and strategy skills developed in his lawyer’s toolbox over the course of his stellar twenty-three year legal career to become the president who successfully led the country through the Civil War and eliminated slavery from our borders.
Who is the greatest hero ever to be portrayed on the silver screen?
Answer: Per the American Film Institute’s poll, that distinction is held by a Caucasian trial lawyer with the courage to defend an African-American defendant indicted for the alleged rape of a white teenaged girl before an all-white jury in a small Alabama town during the Great Depression. And that “fictional” hero in To Kill a Mockingbird, in fact, was not “fictional” at all, since his words and deeds essentially channeled the life and personality of Harper Lee’s father, Amasa Lee, in a book that was more memoir than novel.
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A Vision of What the Profession Has Been.pdf
