We fully acknowledge that many law offices are not going to list “the Good” as one of their values. It seems like a broad generalization set in a competitive, litigious, complex world in which it often seems like there are hundreds of different individual conceptions of competing goods. Many lawyers, especially after the large historical transformations of the legal system and the practice of law that occurred in the 1960s, have now become today’s Sophists, willing to argue for the superiority of any one person’s “private good” over that of any other competing “private good” for a fee.
But as lawyers who have spent considerable time reflecting on how many of today’s law offices are run, to the detriment of that law office’s own clients, and to the detriment of our Courts and due process, clogging our legal system of litigated case after case, our Firm has made the intentional and conscious decision to only hire and employ attorneys and support staff who would join with Socrates’s objection to the Sophists. In other words, as attorneys (and thereby officers of the Court who have duties to uphold appropriate legal process in our legal system), we refuse to accept the Sophist argument that justice is only pretend.
When we work with each individual client’s specific case, we are working from the perspective that there really is a value of justice and fairness that is more than just the mere manipulation of power. Because we are working from this intellectual foundation, we assume that there is a good common to all human beings. This good cannot be merely artificial, fake, pretend, the mere result of an at-will contract that may be withdrawn at any time. Instead, our laws, our courts, and our legal system is designed to uphold and maintain a good that is common to us all.
When a client walks into our law firm, we want that client to know that we are committed to a good that is greater than ourselves. The United States is a Constitutional Republic, designed to protect our shared and common goods. We understand that any man or woman who contacts a lawyer does so either to pursue, obtain, protect, or defend some good. And, since Reason is the life of the law, we hold, like Plato, that goodness is ultimately the ground of Reason. Or, in other words, any law, court ruling, settlement, legal outcome, or binding legal document should not just have reasons for it, but it should have good reasons.
D.C. Schindler wrote that “reason is a kind of desire for goodness and thus has its proper end in the order governed by the good.” We live in an order, a res publica, and a community together. Our community, local, state, and national, is a good. We have a court system where the law can stand between the weaker and the stronger. This legal procedure that we possess is a good. We have those that we love, and we have the liberty to plan for and provide for them, their protection, their growth, and their flourishing. The exercise of this liberty to care for and protect those we love is a good. The craft known as the practice of law, if it is to be of any value at all, must have the priority of upholding the good that is common to us all.