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39 J. Clev. B. Ass'n 1 (1967-1968)

handle is hein.barjournals/clevebaj0039 and id is 1 raw text is: The Responsibilities of the Legal Profession By the HON. WILLIAM J. BRENNAN Justice, U. S. Supreme Court' We are gathered here to commemo- rate the one hundred and fiftieth an- niversary of the founding of the Ilar- vard Law School. This is a great day, not only for the Law School and for the University but for the profession and the Nation as well. I shall have something to say today about the cen- trality of the legal profession in the public life of our country. But I would open by reminding you of what few In this audience, at least, would chal- lenge: the preeminanco of this school in the history of American legal edu- cation. Here we are on familiar grouni and I will be brief. The school's beginnings we r e humble enough: a faculty of two, Judge Parker and Asahel Stearns, in three rooms of two-story Second College House, I a u n c hed this enterprise. Through Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the law school in the Nineteenth Cen- tury remade the basic attitude of the profession toward the law: viewing it not as a system of self-enclosed and immutable logic, but as a social instrument. This insight was carried forward by the great faculty of the turn of the century: by Langdell and Thayer and Gray and Ames, and later, under Dean Pound, by the fac- ulty of my (lay which included such men as Wambaugh and Beale, Scott and the Warrens, Frankfurter, Wills- ton, and Chafee. The faculty today, under the great leadership of Dean Griswold, is less austere, perhaps, but even more attuned to contemporary challenges and to the problems and opportunities of the future. The school has not been content to rest on memo- ries of a Goilen Age-an age of giants, now legendary. After 150 years, I sense no lessening of vitality. Indeed, I am confident t h a t the school's greatest lays are still be- fore it. *As addreff delivered September 23, 1967 at the Seiquicentennial Celebration of the Law, Sehool of Harvard Univeuiity. To evoke the history of this school, however fleetingly, is to demonstrate the seminal role of the law school- and above all of this law school-in the continuing evolution of the legal profession in this country. There could be no more fitting occasion, there- fore, to re-examine-in the perspec- tive of the past, but with particular emphasis upon the future-the re- sponsibilities of the profession today. This is what I propose to essay this morning. I begin with the observation-a tru- ism since de Tocqueville wrote so discerningly of American society in the Ninteenth Century-that lawyers occupy a strategic role in the order- ing of our society. Why is this? It is not, I think, merely that the law trains one in habits of analysis which can be applied fruitfully throughout the range of social problems, or that tradition has inclined to the law in- dividuals disposed to follow also a career in politics or public service- though these are doubtless important factors. Equally significant is the fact that governmental action that in other societies is exclusively the pur- view of administrators or legislators is, in America, subject also to judi- cial or quasi-judicial scrutiny. We have been a legalistic society from the beginning. Lawyers were con- spicuous in the vanguard of the revo- lutionary movement and in the draft- Ing of the Constitution, and ever since the diversity of our people, combined with their ingrained sense of justice and moral duty, has caused the so- ciety to frame urgent social, eco. nomic anl political questions in legal terms-to place great problems of social order in the hands of judges for their ultimate resolution. Today, the lawyer is still the in- dispensable middlemtin of our social progress. To him men turn for ad- vice and assistance in their private affairs, for representation in the courts and agencies of government and for leadership in public life. In truth, I think the lawyer's role is more important today than ever. The complexities of modern society are not confined to the technological and scientific spheres; they infect all phases of social organization. The in- tricacy anl pervasiveness of the web- bing of statutes, regulations ani com- mon law rules in this country which surrounds every contemporary social endeavor of consequence give law- yers a peculiar advantage in coming to grips with our social problems. They alone--or so it sometimes seems -are equipped to penetrate directly and incisively to the core of a prob- lem through the cloud of statutes, rules, regulations and rulings which invariably obscure it to the lay eye; I need but remind you of the high complexity of, for example the fed- eral civil rights, urban renewal, pov- erty, and social security statutes. In threading this ulaze, the lawyer has inherent advantages not merely of specialized training and experi- ence, but of detachment, lie is not in- volved as principal in the problems that he is asked to mediate and ad- vise on, but as an agent, and as such can afford, emotionally and intellec- tually, to take a broader long-term view of his clients' needs--whether the client he a private corporation, an individual or a government agency -that can the client himself. For all these reasons, it seems to me unquestionable that the lawyer in America is- uniquely situated to play a creative role in American social progress. Indeed, I would make bold to suggest that the success with which he responds to the challenges of what is plainly a new era of crisis and of promise in the life of our Nation may prove decisive in determining the out- come of the social experiments on which we are embarked. I would remind that in past periods of acute national need the response (Continued on Page 23)

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