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A PROFILE IN PROFESSIONALISM
In my current job, I have begun to figure out how I should have handled my former job. As a practicing lawyer, I often thought that, if I worked hard enough and studied long enough, I would achieve the professionalism to which I aspired, and success would be mine. As a judge, however, I soon understood that true professionalism was something altogether different. It involved something far more important than hard work and book smarts: good judgment. That is the coin of the realm that judges, juries, witnesses, and clients most respect and respond to. By good judgment, I mean a habit of mind that allows for consideration of human motivations and temptations with a practiced but never a censorious eye, the largeness of spirit to let an adversary’s imprecations go unanswered, and to remain equally impervious to unearned praise. It refers to the tranquility to understand that courtroom victories are not as dispositive, and courtroom disappointments not as devastating, as first they appear. It is vision broad but long, so that the vista encompasses consequences not just of the immediate act, but of those well down the continuum. It is good judgment that enables lawyers to make distinctions and gradations so fine they cannot be captured in words. Judgment is what Melville had in mind in Billy Budd, Sailor, that intricate novel of martial law: “Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does one first blindingly enter into the other?” Those of us who aspire to professionalism – judges no less than lawyers – will need to call upon sound and seasoned judgment to distinguish good from bad lawsuits, just from unjust tactics, that which we must do from that which we would like to do. A commitment to professionalism requires us to reach deep within ourselves to decide upon, and evince, a commitment greater still to those less fortunate than ourselves and to the common good. |
