In the tapestry of civic life, members of the legal profession hold or should hold a profound role as wise citizens, as educators, and most of all as thoughtful guardians of the rule of law, as Louis H. Pollak described in his 1998 article “Professional Attitude”. Bruce Green echoed in a 2009 article that obligations extend well beyond technical mastery but must be integrated within the public life by lawyers. The legal profession carries a distinctive obligation to model civic virtue: to wield language with precision, to cultivate disinterested public service, and to hold leaders, including lawyers, accountable to constitutional norms and to personal and professional virtue.
Disinterested and Virtuous Service
When the founders established the constitutional republic, they were concerned with the fundamental question whether Americans had sufficient civic virtue. Notably, a republic requires citizens “to soften the sharpest edges of self-interests, to temper the most disruptive personal and social passions, and to ensure sentiments of support and patriotism for the polity,” Richard Vetterli and Gary C. Bryner wrote for BYU Studies. Notably, the duo continued, “the scheme of government envisioned by the framers accepted as All given a moderately virtuous people and moderately virtuous office holders.” A concept central to the Anglo-American civic tradition has grown unfamiliar or has been quietly redefined.
“Disinterested service” once meant service rendered without regard to personal or financial advantage. The scriptural formulation from the book of Ecclesiastes is ancient: “Better is a handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and striving after wind.” As part of this, the broader tradition of noblesse oblige (the expectation that privilege entails proportionate obligation) has historically animated American public life across party lines. Those who enter public service with every societal advantage incur, at minimum, a heightened duty to deploy that advantage in service of others, a concept Peter Feuerherd explored for JSTOR Daily in 2001. Lawyers are not exempt from this expectation; they are their primary custodians.
As Green wrote, lawyers “have a far broader responsibility for incorporating an understanding of the public good into their practice.” Legal professionals across the ideological spectrum have at times failed this standard, and others have honored it with distinction. Presidents Ford and Obama, both lawyers, embodied, in quite diverse ways, the proposition that the profession can and should produce leaders who subordinate personal interest to virtuous conduct or at least an attempt to hold this and most of all to constitutional duty. A concept noted in the opus: Make Your Mark: Lessons in Character from Seven Presidents.
A constitutional republic rests on a foundational distinction, authority rests in offices and not in persons. The founders understood arguably that republican government depends on leaders who read, who reason, and who are capable of virtuous self-restraint, as Vetterli and Bryner noted. George Washington’s voluntary relinquishment of power on more than one occasion was not merely personal virtue; it was and remains a constitutional statement, if lawyers adhere to its mandates. The American republic’s survival has never been automatic. At each critical juncture, it has been dependent on citizens and on citizen lawyers who were willing to subordinate short-term advantage to long-term constitutional integrity consistent with civic virtue and disinterested service.
The legal profession can acquire, once again, its respect by wielding its responsibility to speak clearly on the merits and without partisan qualification against breach of norms and the violation of professional ethics on the public square. Lawyers as officers of the court and as interpreters of what it means to be a good citizen must serve more than as legal technicians, Pollak continued. Lawyers are called to participate in the formation of policy, to mediate disputes at the intersection of law and social conflict, and to ensure that constitutional principles retain practical force. Vetterli and Bryner indicated, “When occasions present themselves, in which the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations, it is the duty of the persons whom they have appointed to be the guardians of those interests, to withstand the temporary delusion, in order to give them more time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection.”
Language, Literature, and Civic Wisdom
Democratic governance and civic virtue depend on linguistic commonality: words that mean what they say and arguments that can be examined and contested with ardency but with intellectualism and skill.
Rhetoric, literature, history, and philosophy have long been understood as essential to the formation of wise public servants. Legal commentator Dan Levitt observed that biblical, literary, and historical analogies “too rarely come to our minds—perhaps because more technical studies have replaced the arts as the most popular college courses.” Lawyer-citizens must read more, not as a private luxury, but as a professional necessity. The intellectual life does not end at graduation; it is, for those who would serve the republic, a permanent obligation. As two lawyers with print-based disabilities, a duty to read and study and the libraries where this happens resonates with each of us. Yet, barriers remain to those with print-based disabilities when seeking access to information or to practice law.
The consequences are visible in public life when rhetorical skills and thoughtful conversation are not the commitment, the goal, and the study by the modern member of the legal profession. A coarsening of argument, a narrowing of moral imagination, an impoverishment of the vocabulary available for genuine deliberation has occurred.
Artificial Intelligence and the Limits of Augmentation
Constitutionalism and the role of the lawyer as its wielder cannot be wisely written upon without touching on emerging technologies. The future of governance and legal practice will increasingly involve working with or working alongside artificial intelligence. However, the risks of AI are formidable. With lawyers often serving in roles of leadership, AI could help advance democratic norms or even promote peaceful settlement of disputes on the public square. Yet humans must remain in control with AI as a tool, not as the overlord. Any number of dystopian films depict when AI supplants democratic norms and humans as operators.
The subtleties of human emotion and moral nuance are those characteristics of what it means to be human. While AI may mimic empathy through programmed responses; it cannot truly sense the silent sorrow or hidden pain that often underlies a negotiator’s stance. The algorithms may draw lines and recommend settlements, but they lack the intuitive grasp of compassion and the irreplaceable ability to recognize and respond to vulnerability with genuine care.
As Pollak observed, “In Jacksonian America that was De Tocqueville’s laboratory, governmental restraints on ordinary life were (as contrasted with today) relatively infrequent and unobtrusive.” As such, AI has its risks. Deployed without adequate safeguards, AI-enabled systems can at best facilitate a polarization of citizens within a republic leading to its fracture or at worst can orchestrate and implement surveillance at a scale inconsistent with the freedoms a constitutional republic is designed to protect. Several high-density municipalities in China have implemented social credit systems that, while nominally designed to encourage positive civic behavior, function primarily as instruments of social control, which the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions reported in a 2021 study.
Therefore, legal professionals who understand constitutional principles must engage seriously with AI governance, not as technologists, but as guardians of the legal and ethical frameworks within which technology must operate.
In conclusion, the 250th anniversary of American independence is an occasion not merely for commemoration but for recommitment. “The Constitution is not simply a mechanical device but requires a careful balance among the structure of government and the nature and political culture of the people who must make it work,” Vetterli and Bryner wrote. The enduring importance of the lawyer as a wise and cultured educator and protector of the republic lies in historical awareness and wisdom, in positive political engagement, and in an overall artistic sensibility that he or she dedicates as a small but inadequate expression of what it means to be a grateful and committed citizen. Therefore, legal professionals must recommit themselves to civic virtue: to model disinterested service in every professional interaction, to hold colleagues and networks accountable to lofty standards of civic conduct, and to exemplify, for younger practitioners and for the public, what it looks like when a lawyer takes seriously the full weight of the oath she has sworn.
Gary C. Norman, Esq. L.L.M. is a past Public Policy Conflict Resolution Fellow and a consultant. He serves as an adjunct law professor at CSU College of Law. Debra A. Vey Voda-Hamilton, Esq., founder of Hamilton Law and Mediation PLLC, is a nationally recognized specialist in animal conflict mediation.