legal sanity

I recently finished Thane Rosenbaum’s book The Myth of Moral Justice: Why Our Legal System Fails to Do What’s Right. While my personal take on the legal profession’s future falls more into the “glass half full” camp, Rosenbaum accurately highlights some of the systemic weaknesses that need redressing. Throughout the book, he chronicles the need for lawyers to once again regard themselves as members of a healing profession, noting that “a client with a grievance is not that much different from a patient in pain” and that the “origins of what brings many litigants to the courthouse are indignities done to the spirit.” He also points to a critical breakdown of communication between most lawyers and their clients. Trained to think only in terms of legal rights and interests and unschooled in “the art of empathy,” Rosenbaum opines, lawyers simply can’t hear “the language of grievance” their clients are speaking. Whether or not you agree with his contention that the legal system/profession lacks a moral dimension, Rosenbaum provides a lot of food for thought on this important subject.