QUITTING THE BAR, TWICE : What the law taught me about faith

Commonweal, May 19, 2000 by Heather King

I know exactly how they feel: I am still trying to figure all that out, too. I am deeply grateful for the paradox that my law school education--conceived in ignorance, executed in darkness--now supports me while I "store up my treasure" and try to make my way as a writer. But I still wonder whether or not I have used my time on earth wisely. I will always instinctively side with almost any plaintiff over any corporate defendant, any employee over any employer, any member of a minority over any alleged bigot, but I do not delude myself these days that my legal work even remotely promotes the causes of racial harmony or sexual tolerance. I know too much about my own capacity for hatred, my own propensity to hold on to the compulsions and resentments that are killing me, to think that a lawsuit could heal such wounds--whether they are plaintiffs' wounds or defendants' wounds--in anyone else. Litigation does not seem to be working, has not managed to advance or increase our civil rights in any meaningful way, has not made us happier or more at peace with ourselves and our fellow man.

It sounds crazy, but could it be, I sometimes wonder, that given the parameters of the adversarial system, lawsuits never work, that force never sets the universe right in the long run, that each courtroom victory only inflates the winner with a subtle sense of the wrong kind of entitlement and fuels the loser with more hatred and rage? Could it be, as the novelist Amos Oz has theorized, that a sense of humor is the last bulwark against fanaticism, and that therefore the worst thing about the law really is that it has no sense of humor? Does William Rehnquist know any more about how the world really works than the wild-haired man writing squiggles on his legal pad all day?

Sitting in the library surrounded by my highlighters and Post-it notes and Federal Reporters, I don't have many answers. In the end, we are all like those people in my old torts textbook: the aunt who had the chair pulled out from beneath her without warning, the fat lady in the grocery store insulted for no good reason, the beautiful girl maimed by a faceful of lye. In the end, we go through life assaulted at random, blindsided by tragedy, stumbling through the dark nights and occasional lights of a mysterious world. We are good at finding people to blame, but the flashes of light, the rare moments of illuminating grace in which we are given to see that--losers, misfits, drunkards, weaklings--we are loved beyond all imagining anyway....Who, I keep wondering, is responsible for those moments?

"The light shines in darkness and the darkness has not overcome it." I know a little bit more now than I used to, but none of it has come from a law book.

Heather King, a previous contributor, lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in Notre Dame Magazine and other publications.