by The Honourable Madam Justice Rosalie Abella

This is Part Two of excerpts from Madam Justice Rosalie Abella’s 1998 F. Murray Fraser Lecture on Professional Responsibilities. Part One, published in the April issue of BarTalk, discussed the nature of the legal profession’s relationship with the public. Below are Justice Abella’s “Five Conceptual Tools to Keep Balance and Idealism Within Reach, and Cynicism at Bay”.

The public’s dream is for justice and they want lawyers to help them realize it. This is the dream that drove most of you to law school, and it is the dream that drove me. How can we keep the dream alive in such a turbulent social environment and such a pressurized professional one? Let me offer five conceptual tools that have helped me keep my balance and idealism within reach, and my cynicism at bay.

1. Being a lawyer means working hard. But I consider that a luxury. To be able to spend your days, and occasionally nights, feasting the mind on the intellectual grid that law generates is a feast one can easily get obese on. But having designated law as a luxury, it is worth remembering Oliver Wendell Holmes’ admonition, “Give us the luxuries of life and we will dispense with the necessities.” And what do I mean by necessities? I mean books, music, theatre, movies, newspapers, partners, children, friends and family. Law is a profession that profits on the frailties of people, and unless we continue to immerse ourselves in life, we will become strangers to the world which comes to us and asks us to solve its problems. Unless we know what the realities of life are, we not only lose the context in which we offer our services, we risk achieving a personal chronological seniority replete with credentials and clients, but replete too with regret at the misused moments and milestones.
2. Truman Capote once said of a close friend, “She has only one fault. She’s perfect. Otherwise, she’s perfect.” There will be, on all of you, as members of a venerated profession and as people who want to stay venerated, an enormous pressure to be perfect.

So what does it mean to strive for perfection and who is our adjudicator? We have many. If we try to please everyone, we may find it to be a sedative against courage. If we try to please only some, we risk criticism. And if we try to please no one, we risk obsolescence.

In your professional audience will be those who admire and those who resist, but the important judge is inside you, and if his or her vision sits comfortable with your work or decision, that may be the best voice to leave to time. In the end, we may not be perfect, but if we can say we did our best, and that our best was our most professional, then we have done the thing that entitles us to whatever share of perfection the fallible human can earn.

3. Keep an open mind. Chesterton said, “I am the man with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before.” There is very little that has not already been examined, and yet a great deal, paradoxically, left to learn. Our expertise has not cloaked us with omniscience. It may have given us tools others may lack, but with these should come the confidence to listen and ask, not to guess. The quest for understanding and knowledge loses its momentum with smugness and myopia.

As lawyers, society has clothed you with leadership. It is a mantle we deserve as long as we remain open to the positive changes evolving in society. The phrase “status quo” can just as legitimately be a question as a preservative. I acknowledge that thinking with the majority is an excellent way to develop a reputation for wisdom, but being empathatic with a minority, while not an arriviste’s quickest route to success, may nonetheless be an excellent route to continued relevance. Traditions are meant to be respected but not worshipped. And if, on being open to expanded realities, we find that they are no longer constructive, we must be open to finding ways of adding new solutions for the future to the solutions of the past.

4. When Elvis Presley died, one cynic observed, “Good career move.” Where is generosity when you need it? Why do we sometimes revel in the climbs of the underdogs, then rush to deflate them when their luck or timing or ideas exceed public expectation or our own ambition?

We seem to need a homogenization of success to make our own seem more manageable, and enjoy more than we dare admit when the mighty, having succumbed to the yanking of the many, have fallen. What force of nature makes us so nervous about the pursuit of excellence, and what Conradian ambivalence leads us at the same time to pursue it so vigorously?

This is a large and growing profession with lots of room for all. You will each find your place and you each have the right to aim and reach the heights that your talents and interests dictate. Those of us a few steps ahead will gladly make room for you, but the quasi-Faustian bargain is a commitment from you to do likewise for those who come with or after you. This profession has an insatiable need for quality, and each of you, in your own way has a contribution to make, regardless of title, income, gender, race, or professional direction.

Enjoy the success you will inevitably have, but enjoy the success of others as well. We’re all part of the same tapestry, and each exciting thread makes the cloth we weave together stronger and brighter.

5. And so finally to success, the siren who beckons and enthralls. There is no doubt that the word has earned, both in the “me first” decade of the 70s and the “me only” decade of the 80s, a pejorative label whose menacing inspiration for the 90s appears to be “who cares”. It’s too bad, because in its heyday success also meant integrity and tolerance and ability of the finest order. There were and still are many who know that a Chevy gets you there as well as a Mercedes, and that the way you get there matters as much as whether you get there at all.

Let us grant those who are fortunate enough to accumulate healthy personal economies the satisfaction to enjoy them. But let us remember too that success for a profession is ultimately measured by its professionalism, by the extent to which it remembers whom and how it serves. You will be asked to defend, advocate, legislate, write, formulate, negotiate, or teach on behalf of a public which consists of those whose lives range from the very fortunate, to those who, as Lippmann said, “come from the day’s drudgery to the evening’s despair.” They are all your public and it is for them we exist. And we are as successful as those various publics decide we have served them.

We are, as a profession, like an orchestra. Different people at different times will step up to the podium to conduct, and there are many scores we will be asked to perform. We have our euphonious strings but we also need the percussionists to give us resonance. Like my hero George Gershwin, we should be able to be as comfortable creating the elite “Concerto in F” as the more populist “Embraceable You”.

This article was published in the June 1998 issue of BarTalk and is subject to the copyright by the British Columbia Branch of the Canadian Bar Association, 2006, all rights reserved.