Each year I use my
messages in Law Quadrangle Notes to
examine a quality that helps to define an outstanding attorney. I have discussed how great lawyers
pursue intellectual growth and renewal, maintain integrity, teach others about
the law, serve as community citizens, bolster our profession’s image, and
exhibit patience. In the
coming year, I would like to explore the quality of optimism.
As a philosophical concept, optimism has
had a rough go. It originated in
the early eighteenth century theological writings of Gottfried Leibniz, who
contended that our world is an “optimum” in the mathematical sense. Leibniz asserted that there had been a
divine decision to create “the best of all possible worlds,” and that evil and
suffering are necessary elements of a universal order.
Relatively few people read Leibniz today,
thanks largely to Voltaire. A few
years after an earthquake devastated Lisbon in 1755, Voltaire began to depict
optimism, at least as it had been popularized by Alexander Pope, as a form of
complacent speculation, irrelevant to the real-world problem of how we might
alleviate suffering and evil. In Candide,
Voltaire satirized Pope with the memorable character of the tutor, Dr.
Pangloss, who prattled on insipidly about how everything must be for the
best. “He could prove to
admiration that there is no effect without a cause; and, that in this best of
all possible worlds, the Baron's castle was the most magnificent of all
castles, and My Lady the best of all possible baronesses.”
Over a century later, in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the
character Lord Henry expressed his contempt for optimism as follows: “The reason we all like to think so
well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism
is sheer terror.”
Nowadays popular portrayals of lawyers
suggest that we are all Lord Henry.
The attorneys who capture the greatest media attention often exude
disdain for high-minded ideals of truth and justice. Their actions appear to be the product of a profound
alienation, leavened only by a manipulative and cynical self-interest.
Yet my own experience of our profession
is otherwise. The best lawyers I
have known can properly be
described as optimistic at their core.
Why is that? In what sense
can one say that an optimistic spirit has infused the people who most
effectively serve their clients and have the greatest impact on the world
around them?
One may begin by recognizing a breed of
optimism that stops short of Panglossian. Active rather than complacent,
pragmatic rather than foolish, this optimism can motivate competent lawyering.
During the coming year, I look forward to exploring that breed of optimism in this column and elsewhere in my work as dean. For if I am right that such a quality characterizes the most effective practitioners of our craft, then we should be asking what role our law school can appropriately play in nurturing that quality in the lawyers of the twenty-first century.
