Lawyer Bashing by a Former Bush Administration Policymaker
Zelikow contends that in the aftermath of 9/11, the Bush Administration turned to lawyers to assess the legality of various policy options on interrogation and other issues, and that these lawyers, per their training, asked the question whether the proposed policy options (including the "enhanced" interrogation techniques) could be accomplished legally without asking whether they should be undertaken. That focus on could but not should, Zelikow argues, is simply a function of the narrowness of legal education. Here is a crucial passage from Zelikow's speech:
This is simply false. Although not in practice, Zelikow did go to law school and should know better. From Lon Fuller through Ronald Dworkin, leading legal scholars have argued that law and morality are inseparable. Even those who disagree --- who follow in the positivist footsteps of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., H.L.A. Hart, and my colleague Joseph Raz --- do not say that moral arguments play no role or even a small role in the formulation of legal rules. On the contrary, they say that when lawyers disagree about what the law requires, but nonetheless make normative arguments, those arguments are moral arguments rather than strictly legal ones. Importantly, even for positivists, it is lawyers who make these moral arguments. As for legal education, the whole point of the Socratic method is to bring out the moral and policy consequences of various rules of law, so that, to the extent permitted by authoritative sources, one can select the best rule under the circumstances. Socrates himself was (among other things) a moral teacher, who inspired his students to question received moral wisdom.Lawyers are not generally trained in legal policy. Even some of the finest lawyers cannot be considered expert in it. Confronted with a novel problem, the habit of thought developed in law schools, and practice, is to spot the legal issue and determine an authoritative, or at least arguable, position on what the law requires. It is important for lawyers, and those who use them, to know the strengths and limitations of these skills. [Consider] moral reasoning. Moral reasoning, which most people think has something to do with ‘right and wrong,’ is not taught in law school. The relationship of law to morality is an interesting question, wonderfully explored by thinkers as diverse as Edmond Cahn and James Q. Wilson. But, for better or worse, moral reasoning is not generally taught in law school.
Zelikow has things exactly backwards when he taxes the legal profession with the moral blindness of Alberto Gonzales, Jay Bybee and John Yoo. He lets them and their ilk off the hook for DISTORTING legal analysis in the pursuit of immoral aims. The problem with the infamous torture memos is not that they dotted every legal i and crossed every legal t while missing the bigger moral questions. Quite the opposite. The problem is that the government lawyers who wrote them set aside the law --- including its moral commands --- to reach the policy outcomes that their political masters desired.
posted by Michael C. Dorf @ 8:25 AM
3 Comments:
At 10:30 AM,
Kenji said…
Prof. Dorf:
I disagree with you on this. Yes, Fuller, Dworkin, etc., all said interesting things about law and morality---The problem is that I took one class that dealt with legal theory (Perspectives), a survey course that did not require me to think very hard about any deep moral issues, and most of my fellow students had equally limited exposure to legal theory. I have done most of my deep thinking on my own outside the classroom.
As for the Socratic method, I have to say that it also did not make me think about the moral aspects of legal analysis. I learned how flexible the law is, and how judges make up rules---which is pretty severe in certain areas of law like Constitutional Law.
I strongly disagree what some of the lawyers within the Bush Administration have done over the last several years. However, my moral objection has nothing to do with what I learned in law school.
At 10:52 AM,
Ricky said…
Hm. At the law school I went to, morality was only ever referred to obliquely, thrown into the legal analysis slop bucket along with "considerations of public policy." About as close as anybody got to discussing the moral ramifications of a decision or trend was to assert that it was "unfair." To the extent that "The Socratic Method" was used at my school, it had nothing whatever to do with the maeutic method of the historical Socrates, with Greek philosophy generally, or with morality. I knew I shoulda gone to Harvard! :-)
At 3:19 PM,
Jamison Colburn said…
As someone who has attended two law schools and taught at (yikes) four of them, I find myself disagreeing with Mike on this one. Acknowledging minor, add-on exceptions in the curriculum, I actually think there's a little fire under the smoke the Bush flack throws up. It's more a question of role, though, isn't it? I don't think most law school classes even give students express permission (let alone encouragement) to play the role of lawyer at the same time they play the role of citizen. In fact, with Kronman, I think one's role as a lawyer is hardly ever modeled in today's contracts, corporations or other substantive classes as: step 1, determine what the client can and can't do; step 2: tell the client what they ought to do, all things considered. I do, however, recall a colleague who teaches ethics and methods suggesting at the time that the torture memos were a category mistake: they were packaged as an unvarnished presentation of the law when, in fact, they were an excerise in subtle twisting usually reserved for appellate papers. This might swing a little in Mike's direction . . . .
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