HEALTH WEEK
22 Obiter Dicta
Whole-brain
» continued from page 21
which stress can be a motivator and for which the
sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight mode)
must be activated. However, there are other tasks, for
which the parasympathetic nervous system (rest and
digest) must be employed. What the world needs are
lawyers who can move freely between those states,
and do so at will, amidst the urgency of their work.
Three Problems, One Solution
I use the term life skills because the professional
skills that result in ethical lawyering, along with a
lasting competitive advantage, are the same personal
skills which produce abiding wellbeing. Those skills
include: the capacity for objectivity, or having a sense
of self apart from our life experiences and reactions
thereto; wisdom, or the ability to see options amidst
obstacles and the capacity to discern which of the
two to honour at any particular time; resilience,
or being able to heal from trauma; commitment, or
the talent of persevering in the face of hardship; and
finally, being connected to something greater than
ourselves—whether that’s community, nature, or the
divine.
This type of life learning, whatever form of
culturally appropriate tools it comes to you in—
traditional knowledge, scripture, therapy, or
continued education — is both the greatest gift we
can give ourselves and a human need as basic as food
and water. Severing such lessons from the pedagogy
of law is a misstep. It is injurious to steward students
into a service profession, without a conversation
about the importance of fulfilling the responsibilities
they have to themselves, not in lieu of meeting their
professional obligations, but so that they are best
equipped to do so.
Ethical Lawyering Classes: Necessary But
Insufficient
Ethics are a product of the ideologies within which
we find a home. Yet, ways of knowing rooted
exclusively in left brained faculties, such as reason,
only approximate a partial understanding of reality
and thus, a partial value offering to our clients. We
depend on right brain faculties to give meaning to
our logic. It is the knowing born of empathy or the
lack thereof, alongside our own sense of emotional
abundance or scarcity, that shapes our operational
beliefs around what’s fair and good, or unfair and
undesirable. Operational beliefs are the beliefs that
influence the choices we make when we think no one
is watching. The narrower our perspectives, the more
skewed our beliefs become.
Partial perspectives, whether we are conscious of
them or not, and whether rooted exclusively in left
or right bra in faculties, lead to scenarios wherein
irrational choices can be rationalized over and over
again, until they result in the implosion of the very
entities they seek to serve. This holds true whether
those choices have to do with how we approach client
advocacy, professional ethics, or stress.
A few years ago, when questioned about the ethics
of advising the United States government on how
to torture prisoners without violating anti-torture
laws, a deputy Attorney General famously suggested
the task did not pose any ethical dilemmas because
“legal opinions have never caused anyone any injury.”
This statement can only be understood as cognitive
dissonance, and cognitive dissonance is not a moral
designation; it is an abdication of responsibility
for the impact of our choices on others and the
true character of our life’s work, as well as a tacit
endorsement of the morality our decisions as lawyers
imbue the world with.
This is precisely the sort of thinking that leaves
fifteen year old Omar Khadr in Guantanamo Bay,
places Aboriginal children in residential schools, and
mortgages away the ecological future of our nation.
Of course, educating for life skills does not guarantee
students will make the best choices at all times, only
that they will be better equipped to do so than they
are now.
The Laws We Aren’t Learning
In Indigenous legal traditions, laws are passed
down as instructions in how to live a good life.
I offer this example in contrast to common law
traditions, wherein the separation of spirituality
and state has had the unintended consequence
of removing questions about who we are, what
we want out of life, and how to be human from
public discourse—
q uestions each of us must
answer, whether we do so through the lens of faith,
agnosticism, or atheism.
The direct result of failing to ask and answer these
questions, both as professionals and as a polity, is
decay—a moral, political, social, and environmental
erosion that leads to reduced functionality,
an increase in dysfunction, and collapse. This
unconscious erosion begins with a rupture in our
relationship with ourselves, spreads to all our other
relationships from there, and from those relationships
back to us.
Changing how we treat each other and how we
If you have
the ambition.
Some people have long known what they want out of a career. They look beyond their present and focus
on their future: a future with international scope, global clients and limitless possibilities.
If you are that person, you’ve just found where your future lies.
Law around the world
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