This is the final part of a 3 part series on the work of Thomas Shaffer, an American lawyer and ethicist.
Reading Thomas
Shaffer’s work has generated many light bulb moments for me. As a lawyer who
has struggled to reconcile the pure ideal of the law with the reality of
practice, Shaffer’s astute observations reveal the idolatrous trust that we put
in our law, our legal system and our lawyers. At the same time, his optimism
and story-based approach to teaching ethics rather than abstracting issues
assures me that the daily work of lawyering is thoroughly moral. A person works
not just with his knowledge and skill but with his whole person.
In the first post of this series, we examined Shaffer’s
characterization of the gentleman-lawyer who maintained a coherent self without
separating personal and professional ethics, but tended to be hubristic. In the
second post, we examined the lawyer-client relationship and concluded that the
best kind of relationship exists when the lawyer and client are both concerned
for the good of the other. In this final post, we will consider Shaffer’s proposal
on how the Christian faith influence the way a lawyer practises.
Lawyers often claim to be serving
their clients and their clients’ best interest. But service that is rendered in
return for some status or financial reward can hardly be called service in the
true sense. As C.S. Lewis said (of his own profession), “we should not be
ashamed of our need to earn bread, although we cannot suppose the need to be a
virtue. It is probably a better thing for us to consider the need with relative
candor...than to perpetuate a fiction...”[1]
Shaffer says that the service that God demands is one that is
consequent on serving God. Our service follows the example of the way Jesus
serves.[2]
First, Jesus was a servant, not merely offering a
service. He was obedient to God in his
serving, to the point of suffering.[3]
In Philippians 2:6-7, Paul writes,
Christ Jesus: who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God
something to be grasped,
but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant.
did not consider equality with God
something to be grasped,
but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant.
To be a like Jesus in his servanthood, a lawyer is not merely to
serve his client and be their servants, but
to expect to suffer for it. Like Atticus Finch, who suffers the scorn of
others when he defends Tom Robinson.
Second, Jesus served through powerlessness.[4]
Jesus renounces power out of choice in order to render a service. He says,
“Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for the
kingdom of God belong to such as these. I tell you the truth, anyone who will
not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” (Luke
18:16-17; Mark 9:35-37)
Being
a child means being without power. Jesus makes people his subjects through
their own free decision rather than as objects of his power. The kingdom Jesus
speaks about is one he enters without sharing in worldly power. As Martin Buber
says, the way to the kingdom is not to tread on the surface of success.[5]
Third, Jesus served for reconciliation.[6]
Jesus came to reconcile God and man and man with fellow man. Shaffer says the
aim of moral life with clients is to serve in such a way so that the client himself
will be a servant – that he will himself be moved to love and good works
(Hebrews 10:23).[7]
With the ethics of servanthood, a person approaches the other not
because of moral or professional choice but as one who is cherished. “The
client is cherished not as an equal, but as a superior, my master, as the boss.”[8]
Like Jesus washing the disciples feet, Shaffer calls on lawyers to a culture of
humility and servanthood. Karl Barth calls on the professional worker to leave
his isolation and self-centredness, “not in order to be satisfied in his
altruism, but in order to make his professional action correspond to the
biblical model, the suffering servant, who works in the shadow and whose
achievement may be in the deep of failure.”[9]
The suffering, powerless,
conciliatory servant lawyer is antithetical to most people’s conception of a
lawyer. It is a risky approach in a litigious world when clients frequently sue
their lawyers. But Christians take on this servanthood because they are
imitating their Lord, and because they do not work out of fear but confidence
that they have a greater reward from Him.
Shaffer’s narrative ethics is shaped
by his Catholic faith. He takes the everyday “stuff” of legal practice, specifically
the interactions between lawyers and their clients, disentangles the
pretentious and idolatrous from the true, and applies the stories of heroes and
anti-heroes to them. Insofar as he draws moral significance from heroes,
Shaffer borrows William McClendon’s idea of “biography as theology”. McClendon
had said that in the religious life, images and metaphors are prior to
principles and propositions, and religion consists of applying such images to
life – images such as the Cross, the Suffering Servant and atonement.[10]
Shaffer studies characters who live out their faith in this way, rather than abstract
biblical concepts to apply to ethical situations. In doing so, Shaffer
preserves the coherence of a person’s character with his actions. It is an
indirect way of teaching but an emotive one, and one that is consistent with
the model of discipleship and growing in Christ-likeness.
[1] Shaffer, On Being a Christian and a Lawyer, 158
[2] Shaffer, Faith and the Professions, 61
[3] Shaffer, Faith and the Professions, 62
[4] Shaffer, Faith and the Professions, 63-64
[5] Shaffer, Faith and the Professions, 64
[6] Shaffer, Faith and the Professions, 64-65
[7] Shaffer, Faith and the Professions, 65
[8] Shaffer, Faith and the Professions, 68
[9] Shaffer, Faith and the Professions, 66
[10] Shaffer, Faith and the Professions, 35
