OPINION

Defending UofL law school's compassion project

Sam Marcosson

As I approach the end of my 20th year as a law teacher, I should no longer be surprised that law professors can find a way to complain about things as seemingly pleasant and uncontroversial as blue skies and children’s laughter.  Or, in this instance, compassion.

Nevertheless, I found myself not only surprised, but deeply disappointed and frankly embarrassed that my colleague, Professor Luke Milligan, wrote a misleading opinion column in this space on Jan. 13, objecting to the proposal to have the Brandeis School of Law partner with the city, and many of our leading corporate and civic institutions, as part of the Compassionate Louisville campaign.  The views Professor Milligan expressed completely misrepresented both the nature of the Compassionate Louisville campaign and the law school’s commitment to it.

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The premise of Professor Milligan’s polemic was that identifying the law school as a compassionate institution is somehow a “partisan” stance that takes sides in ideological wars in which he believes a law school should not take sides.  I’m sure that community leaders such as Brown-Forman, Metro United Way, Spalding University, YMCA of Greater Louisville, Norton Healthcare, Guardiacare, KentuckyOne Health, Sacred Heart Academy, Yum! Brands, the University of Louisville Medical School, and dozens more will be quite surprised to learn that by partnering with the Compassionate Louisville initiative, they have all taken sides in the culture wars or been somehow partisan.

Equally surprised, we must assume, are the hundreds of cities across the nation (including such bastions of liberal orthodoxy as Fayetteville, Huntsville, Dallas, Tulsa, and Winston-Salem) that have also become Compassionate Communities, only to learn that they are also part of this partisan, ideological plot to impose compassion.  But according to Professor Milligan, that’s just what they’ve all done.

This is an astonishingly sad way to look at the world - and especially to see the notion of compassion, as being the exclusive preserve of one ideology.  I do not believe it ever occurred to anyone who proposed this at the law school or voted for it that it had any ideological or partisan content at all, or that supporting it somehow sent a message that a commitment to compassion would, could or should exclude anyone based on party or ideology.  It is - not to put too fine a point on it - nonsense to suggest that an initiative toward compassion tells anyone associated with the Law School (whether they are alumni, faculty, staff, or students) that they are outsiders.

Instead, those of us who support identifying the law school as a compassionate institution believe this is important because it says something about how we conduct ourselves and what we identify as priorities.  We want compassion to be an important value, and that the law school should strive for it to be a big part of who we are.

For example, we recognize that attending law school is a time of inordinate stress that our students experience from the time they enter to the time they walk across the stage at graduation.  Studies have shown that students enter law school with levels of depression that are not unusual, but soon after enrolling they begin to show disturbingly high levels of mental health difficulties that only increase as the years go by.

These are indicators of the problems that beset the legal profession, as lawyers experience well-documented and painfully high rates of alcohol abuse, divorce, and suicide.  In light of these statistics, and the underlying problems they reflect, it is hardly “taking sides” or “ideological” to make a commitment to endeavor to treat our students, where and how we can, with compassion during the time they spend with us.

Equally important, we believe it makes all the sense in the world to teach our students how critical it is to be compassionate in how they relate to their clients once they graduate and begin to practice law.  The essence of lawyering is about interacting with clients, understanding their problems, and identifying legal tools to protect or defend their varied interests.  Whether representing criminal defendants, victims of crime, a start-up business, or a Fortune 100 company, our clients - at bottom - expect us to listen, understand their problems, and communicate effective legal advice with the highest levels of judgment.

Good lawyering is, in very great part, compassionate lawyering.  As educators we need to prepare students to do that in the broadest possible range of legal settings.  The Compassion Initiative is at the heart of preparing students for the day-to-day realities of lawyering to meet their clients’ real-world needs.

The same is true in the priorities we set - and have set literally for decades.  The Brandeis School of Law has long required our students to devote 30 hours to public service as a graduate requirement, and many of them do significantly more than that.  That is a commitment to compassion put into practice in the community, to inculcate in our future lawyers the core principle that they have an obligation to give back to the city or town in which they practice.

It also dovetails perfectly with the emphasis on “social justice” that the faculty adopted as part of our most recent strategic plan, to which Professor Milligan also objects.  Neither the members or our faculty, nor our students, are forced to adopt or agree with one vision of what compassion means, or what serves the cause of social justice.

In the public service context, we don’t force our students into any particular project when they fulfill this requirement, and many of them create their own.  In other words, there is no attempt (and never has been) to force-fit one ideological notion of what constitutes service that is in the public interest.

Professor Milligan’s claims of enforced ideological conformity are a tired cliché, with no basis in the reality of what compassion actually means in the context of the law school’s participation in the City of Louisville’s initiative.  Any faculty members who don’t share the institutional commitments are completely free to set their own scholarly and service agenda, and teach their classes as they see fit; nothing either compels or pressures any of us to go along.

Every company, school, or group that is part of the Compassionate Louisville program has sought to identify what “compassion” means in context for that participant – as will the law school.  In my view, a huge part of it for us involves our commitment to service in this community, as evidenced by the law school’s proud record of leadership in the university’s Signature Partnership program.

The public service program, and our clinic, and our Central High Partnership, and our Human Rights Fellowship, and externships in places like the Public Defender’s Office, all serve the values of compassion, and should mark the way for the law school's participation. These involvements also demonstrate what it means to be committed to “social justice” and the “progressive values” for which Justice Brandeis stood for his entire career.

The simple reality is that the name “Louis D. Brandeis” is right there over our front door, and has been since the Law School was named for him in 1997.  It is thus nothing new that we stand with the city of Louisville on the side of compassion and social justice.  It is part of who we are, and what every law school should aspire to be.

Sam Marcosson is a Professor at Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville.