May 2006

“Your obligation to your clients extends to saving their lives.” So said my professor Tony Amsterdam in an interview published in the Stanford Lawyer that I would read and reread from time to time after I graduated from law school. I don’t represent people on death row, though my clients’ cases involve life and death struggles. I’m a family defense lawyer, a strange and nearly unique kind of lawyer who tries to stop the State from seizing children from innocent parents. I’m also a vanishing form of a lawyer–a social policy litigator and legal services refugee, still working to compel state agencies to live up to their constitutional and statutory obligations.

Lately I’ve been wishing my ingrained sense of obligation could take a sabbatical. Sometimes, I wish I didn’t care so much about each client. I’d like law practice to be a day’s work for a day’s pay, and I’d like my day’s pay to equal that of first year associates in major Chicago law firms. I’d like to be able to look dispassionately at legal problems and, if I couldn’t solve them, accept that I had tried my best. I’d like not to relive the civil rights cases I’ve lost in two decades in trying to make a lawless child welfare bureaucracy into something slightly better. I’ve taken Tony Amsterdam’s admonition far too seriously. Now it’s too late to change, however. If I gave up caring about the things that have made me the lawyer I am now, then I wouldn’t any longer be me.

While the clients who call me after no one else has listened keep me awake many nights, I worry more that I have passed my passion for uphill battles onto my children: my older son who started his high school’s debate team after being told “it can’t be done;” my younger son who leaflets and teaches less-advantaged kids to play the flute. My own children, who never were seized from my own custody in the middle of the night, sometimes make my work on behalf of other people’s children unbearably painful. Sometimes I am overcome with irrational worry that they too could be taken away from me through the sorts of false allegations I’m always defending families against. I don’t want my children to know about the work I do. I don’t want them to worry for our family, themselves, or others. Yet, they seem to absorb righteous causes in their bones. They remain strangely fearless, assertive and encouraging. Their understanding calms me and helps me to press on. 

I took an unusual turn after law school into the world of injustice and indifference. I’ve watched mothers’ children taken from them screaming in crowded courtrooms. And I’ve stood with those same mothers as consoler, parenting adviser, lawyer and friend. The life lesson of law I have learned is that law practice often brings commitments that cannot be fulfilled. I’ve learned that helping clients cope with miscarriages of justice is part of carrying on.

Carrying on also includes watching my own children cross the threshold of their own life commitments. When I see that a passion for justice has passed to them, I worry as I swallow my pride. A life of righting grievous wrongs is heart-wrenching, but it comes with indescribable rewards. Though I hope against hope to spare them from the pain that comes in any struggle against suffering and injustice, I know my children will make difference in this world. I realize, too, that so have I.