By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, Radio Free New Hampshire

As an attorney, I have very few professional heroes; very few lawyers to whom I look up, and wish to be more like.

In particular, most of my more famous fellow practitioners are, by turns, ambitious, spineless, or simply amoral (see, for instance, that poison-pronged jellyfish who ran the Justice Department for Donald Trump). It feels like a long time since we lawyers worked hard as a profession to better the lives of our fellow citizens. We don’t get paid for that. We get paid to advance the prospects of whoever is paying us. Others set the agenda itself.

It hasn’t always been like this. Our penchant for being practical rather than philosophical, our basic training in history and rhetoric, our skill at arguing on behalf of abstractions — these things have come in handy in the past.

At times of great upheaval, for instance, lawyers have often taken the lead. The American Revolution was prosecuted by lawyers. This country was led through its only civil war (to date) by a lawyer. Lawyers crafted our response to the Great Depression, the Cold War, and the civil rights era.

Again, however, starting with the Reagan era, the law began to fade as a profession. Businesspeople have become the ones who matter. Lawyers are just hired guns.

Perhaps that’s a function of prosperity itself, so we should be glad. But I think otherwise. I believe that our society has suffered lately from its lack of a legal mindset — from its focus on philosophy rather than on practicality, from its inability to grasp the lessons of the past, from its unwillingness to persuade rather than to preach; and its companion unwillingness to be persuaded, rather than to hew blindly to one’s creed.

The greatest lawyer who ever made his home in New Hampshire was, of course, a New Yorker. He was a judge from the middle of the last century and for several long decades, he summered here in Cornish, where he became good friends with his neighbor, another New Yorker named J.D. Salinger. This lawyer’s name was Learned Hand (yes, that’s one hell of a name).

Hand sat on the federal court of appeals for New York. People waited a long time for Roosevelt to appoint him to the Supreme Court itself, but for one reason or another, that never happened. This is akin to how Ted Williams never won a World Series.

Hand practiced law, anyway, during one of those aforementioned times of great upheaval. He saw his country through a terrible economic collapse, a world war, and a nuclear-haunted peace. His was a voice of reason throughout all of those crises. And by that, I mean he was a classic liberal. He mined a deep cut, so deep that from the bed of his core beliefs could spring other lawyers and politicians as disparate as Richard Nixon and George McGovern both.  

Here is part of a speech that he gave in 1944. Perhaps he wrote it as he summered here in New Hampshire. But even if he wrote it in New York, it is still worth remembering, as we reflect on the continuing havoc being wrought in our country by both the followers of Donald Trump and the new spiritual puritans of the left.

“I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.

“What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned but never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.”

Ladies and gentlemen: lest we forget.

Michael Davidow is a lawyer in Nashua.  He is the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project.  His most recent one is The Book of Order. They are available on Amazon.

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