Religious Lawyering's Second Wave

Abstract

The recent three-hour program on “Professional Responsibility and the Religious Traditions” at the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Schools (“AALS”), sponsored by the Section on Professional Responsibility and co-sponsored by the Section on Law and Religion, represents a milepost in the history of the religious lawyering movement and offers a valuable opportunity to reflect on that history. In 1998, only eight years ago, one of us defined the religious lawyering movement as “an emerging force” in legal ethics. In that short time, the movement has expanded dramatically and has received greater attention within the academy and the bar. It has developed the first institutional vehicles for disseminating and promoting conversations about religious lawyering, both among lawyers of the same faith and among lawyers of different faith traditions. Now the religious lawyering movement is increasingly confronting more complex and more difficult religious, legal and ethical issues; and is extending the religious lawyering conversation internationally.

Lawyers for God and Neighbor: The Emergence of “Law as a Calling” as a Mobilizing Frame for Christian Lawyers

“…Efforts to incorporate discussions of faith and law into mainstream legal scholarship and discourse had “very little success” until the mid‐1990s (Pearce 1998, 1075). During and after this time—a period some scholars have identified as the beginning of the “second wave” (Pearce and Uelmen 2006) of the Christian Lawyering movement—these discussions started to appear with more frequency in mainstream legal outlets. To illustrate, according to one source, the total corpus of mainstream legal literature on Christian Lawyering effectively doubled in size between 1996 and 1998 (Kastleman 1998).…”

“…2 However, in the mid-to-late 1990s, specific portions of both the legal academy and the legal activist community began giving law as a calling a particularized set of meanings. That is, the professional "calling" came to describe a religious conceptualization of legal practice embodied by the model "Christian Lawyer" (see Gerber 1993;Allegretti 1996;Lee 1998;Bost and Perrin 2005;Pearce and Uelmen 2006;Skeel 2008;Caudill 2010). 3 Much of the work on Christian Lawyering attributes the impetus for this scholarship to the popular perception that lawyers are increasingly dissatisfied with their work (see, e.g., Allegretti 1996;Lee 1998;Bost and Perrin 2005).…”

“…However, in the mid‐to‐late 1990s, specific portions of both the legal academy and the legal activist community began giving law as a calling a particularized set of meanings. That is, the professional “calling” came to describe a religious conceptualization of legal practice embodied by the model “Christian Lawyer” (see Gerber 1993; Allegretti 1996; Lee 1998; Bost and Perrin 2005; Pearce and Uelmen 2006; Skeel 2008; Caudill 2010). 3…”

“…This is done in part by redefining lawyers' professional responsibilities in ways that may “conflict with the established understanding of professional responsibility” (Pearce 1998, 1076). For example, instead of being adversarial, objective, and dispassionate, Christian Lawyers “bring religious values to bear on their work” and consider what their faith requires of them (Pearce and Uelmen 2006, 269–70). Beyond the collection of Christian legal scholars who advocate for this reframing, secular researchers interested in the legal profession have begun to note signs of the Christian community embracing and adopting the concept of law as a calling (Southworth 2005; den Dulk 2006).…”