is our legal system in need of a major transformation would justice be better served if lawyers viewed themselves as peacemakers rather than adversarial in combat in this edition of pro se nation we're going to explore a radically new vision of law and justice i mary  american bar association and her soon to be released lawyers as change makers the global integrative law movement she has devoted the last twenty years to the transformation of the legal system and today she is here to share with us her journey her vision and the progress being made thanks for joining us thanks for having me so can you been on quite a journey for a number of years can you just tell us a little bit about what prompted this this adventure i went to law school thinking i was going to change the world and i ended up really being disgusted i had a guy come to me one time and say you really are you're really doing too much and it took me twenty years literally to figure out he was in competition with me and in law school i had seven kids that homos working full time started a couple of organizations i'm one of those doers and he and he was coming up short and i realized that lawyers could be jerks and i didn't want to be a jerk so when i graduated from moscow i ran a domestic violence program for a while and i was in a program you know it was personal growth kind of programs and a guy stood up he was visiting from chicago we were in atlanta and he stood up and he said  my name is for risperdal i'm a lawyer and he said i grant dignity to everyone in the process and i practice divorce law in a different way it's my job to make sure that my client is still friends with the other parent because they're going to raise kids together and i had one of those moments that you see on cartoons the whole sky opened and birds sang it you know the voter flies came out everything was envisaged color and i said i can do that so i had already passed two bar exams but i was living in another state i had to take my next bar exam and i started out and what happened was i immediately hit the wall because i ran into some jerks but at that point i knew that this something else was possible and so that's that's how i began the journey i practiced as a holistic lawyer and i experimented with all these different ways that i was finding that were holistic and peacemaking and i was in a small town in north carolina and and i built a practice that was actually a viable practice and people knew me and they would come to me and people would send me business and so i was actually very successful what i've noticed you know along the way i've been involved in litigation as you know as a party to a lawsuit that went on for ten years and what i learned along the way i'm not a lot of lawyers along the way and it seems like many lawyers do start out wanting to practice law for all the right reasons they  you know they really want to do something good and noble and help people do you think that the the structure of our system right now changes them in the process and  so how they're actually have been some studies on this professor larry krieger is one of the people who's been doing studies and they've shown that in the second semester of the second year lawyer law students have changed  interim law school as normal people with a lot of intrinsic values of wanting to do something for good and by the second semester of the second year something has shifted and that shift is two words so they're looking at grades they're looking at you know a corner office and are they going to get a job that pays them the big bucks and there are a lot of theories about that but i think it has a lot to do with the way we're taught only to the head you know it's like the you know here are the facts and here's what happened is that legally correct or not is that the right decision  that morally right and emotions that sense of morality sort of the soul doesn't come in and effective if you bring that up as i sometimes do when i'm teaching off students there's a you know kind of a t laughter because that's not relevant you know that's not the law and so a lot of my work has been in expanding that view so that is a more holistic perspective it it seems like there is this kind of dichotomy between you know what it what is legal and sometimes what is legal and what is moral and what is ethical and what is actually you know the right thing the true justice in this situation and it it you know what is it is it it's become it's very black it's looked at is very black and white it's either this or it's that but one of my first questions or is really how did we get here how did we get to this particular structure that we have right now though it was actually an evolution so we had we used to beat people over the head with clubs right and then we had people we actually probably dueling came first and then jousting because then you send your knight you're not even personally going and and and those were not good ways of resolving conflict and especially in a systemic way there are you know there wasn't enough reliability or predictability or safety especially and so a court system was designed and so it had really good intentions you know they were looking for predictability and order  and to take too much emotion out of it but like all systems it kind of went too far and you know what happens with end systems change is a system starts for really good reasons but things change in the system keeps going in that direction until it starts disintegrating and so i think we're at a point where the system is starting to destroy the old system is starting to disintegrate because the values have changed our societal values have changed and that also system is not the system that fits us now and instead when systems start changing what happens is that innovators start creating new answers to old problems and that's what i've been doing is looking for those innovators if you could blue sky it what is your vision of this transformation that i believe you have said it's starting to happen but if you could really blue sky what would it look like well it's multifaceted because it's not just lawyer so one is that lawyers would see themselves as peacemakers problem solvers and healers of conflicts but then law makers would take the whole picture and into account and police officers would actually be community servants working in their communities to bring peace and judges would be holding people accountable with compassion and you know there are a lot of different pieces about all the players but including the citizens who would be learning how to resolve their own conflicts and in fact there's a lot of that going on in schools now of teaching peer mediation and restart of justice circles and things like that so our newer generation is learning how to do that and that's part of why i think that the system is changing because we're going to have better prepared citizens entering you know from having been tra that what happened was that as these innovators started coming along they started inventing things so i've probably met forty people who invented holistic law and they really did because they had never met another holistic lawyer right and they just looked around and they said this is the way i'm going to practice and they put holistic lawyer on their ads and they put it on their business cards and then they found each other and so that since one thousand nine hundred one there was an organization of holistic lawyers but before that lots and lots of people were being holistic lawyers and then some lawyers start meditating and i started bringing mindfulness to their law practice and i actually have my elephant which it helps me explain this because the elephant is based on the story of the six blind men and the elephant and each one finds a different part of the elephant in they argue about what it is right so the people who found holistic law said this is it and the people who started mindfulness approaches they said well this is it and then there's restored of justice and collaborative law and conscious contracts and therapeutic jurisprudence and there decided we call it integrated law but but that was an everybody that was just thirty of us who practiced in thirty different areas and so i travel with a self and i and i talk to people i say well you know if you're i'm a meditat or you're see one part of the elephant and if you're a mediator you're seeing another part of the elephant and so we're we're all seeing something which i think is a systemic change is going on and by talking about it with people who have different perspectives we can start discovering what is this bigger change this happening so that's since two thousand and eight i've been traveling around the world interviewing the inner vader's and asking them a lot of questions and learning about what this is this not like i invented it more like i'm observing it and then telling other people about it and so  what's what my next book is about is actually that is that you know that travel around the world and all the different ways that i've discovered people doing it so our voice do you find them most  lawyers and judges are they hungry for this do they want chat is there or is there resistance yet is both ok what happens if i go into just a mainstream group of lawyers is that some of them cry and they throw their arms around me and they say i knew this must be out there well and i and you know you've given me hope they'll be you know sort of the middle forty percent th it's not a big deal and then there will be those who think this is evil incarnate really because they've been taught that you've got to take the emotions out you've got to take the human component out because the law is the law right and so those people maybe i don't think that resistant is the right word because they say they're they're threatened maybe that they're right and by this that you know everything they know about being a lawyer l the way they've been trained you know did not prepare them for this you know lawyers don't let people  cry a lot of lawyers don't practice family law because people might cry in their offices and yet for me i practiced by my law for a long time and i always thought if they didn't cry we had gotten to the heart of things because i was practicing in a holistic way can you give an example of a small example of the old world model and then what you when vision how is it different  since i mentioned the divorce model earlier and that that was the way i had an interest point into this i'll talk about that ok so when somebody  comes to the end of a marriage usually what they do in the old system is they go find the meanest lawyer they can and then they sent a lawsuit that says every horrible thing that's ever happened it's like  dropping a nuclear bomb on the other side trying to descend bell the quote unquote because they they have to be strong right and then the other side has to has to match that and so they're immediately you know but like they're fighting and they can't you know i can't believe that she said that about me you know i was like my worst moment ever and now she's telling the whole world this is public record and what about you know the other forty five years when things were going well and so then there you know there's this war that can go on for years and years and years some some of the divorces i've read about have lasted decades so that's the old model the sort of crossfire they destroy each other and and so then and then you know and if they have kids the kids are destroyed i mean i talk about in terms of the kids are getting the fall out of the nuclear war right so that's that's the old system the way i see it in the way i have practiced is in a more collaborative peacemaking model so actually there is a model called collaborative law and divorce where there are two attorneys and often an interdisciplinary team that come together and so you know up with somebody come to me that i will write a letter to the other party and say this is the way we'd like to do it and then they and here's a list of lawyers who have been trained in this model and you can choose one and if we if if they agree to do it this way and they've done some studies of the people who realize that there is an option to choose this more often than they choose litigation then we actually sit down at the table sit on a table like you know like this is usually a round table and husband and wife and their two attorneys said maybe a mental health practitioner or different states have different models or a financial neutral like whoever is needed in the team to help them make good decisions so i've had real estate appraisers i've had a child advocate you know like what you know we've got a two year old what does a two year old need from parents and the way of a of a schedule right you know let's bring in somebody who knows all about two girls or we've got six pieces of real estate here should we sel should we split them let's bring a real estate advisor and and so instead of being a problem between the husband and wife they're looking to how are we going to solve this together right and so at first glance and actually one mine first interviewees on pro se nation was a collaborative return he so we talked a little bit about that you know at first glance it almost sounds more expensive i think to most people write it's like oh my god i have to have a psychologist or i have to have a financial advisor or i have to have all these people but i would i would imagine that i mean that set from what i know of it it sounds like it's more focused if you're not so much a duelling as you're trying to get to some answers that are going to work for both parties and so maybe in the long run you actually save money in the process you know it's hard to know because you can compare different kinds of cases but you never know how on a case would be right right i have a good friend of mine went through the process and he said to me at the end he says i don't know if we saved money but what i do know is that that other system would never have given me the relationship with my son's mother that i have he said that was priceless right right so maybe it's a savings if it's it could be a savings because for example as a lawyer i make more money than a therapist you know that may not be fair in the world but that's the that's the truth and so when my clients had a therapist i charge them less right because when they have emotional issues  that needed to be resolved i mean i mean i can listen you know all that but i'm not trained to do that right i'm really good at it and you know i've got all the mom stuff going on a hug and i pad and you know all of that but that's not my job right and to pay my hourly rate for that when you can go and get one for that for a therapist who actually knows what to do about it and helps people get through that  if you're dealing with it only on the legal level it's extremely reductionist right writing it sort of discounting all the layers of human emotion in the case of divorce and many other type cases for that matter yes so it means i use divorce because i mentioned it earlier but it doesn't matter what kind of law it is we're still dealing with human beings people used to say we're corporate law that doesn't have any emotions but but when you're dealing with your livelihood you know if you've got an employment issue that's pretty emotional that's not something that you can just say that the emotions realm come in what what would you say now i know you lecture all over the country all over the world what do you say to individual attorneys who are not connected to this movement they want something different but where do they begin what if they're not if they're not connected to the movement a lot of times when i do as i say i connect them to them as one of things i do as i find out what are they doing and who else is doing that and i've found sometimes that somebody literally across the hall is also interested but it's not safe to talk about right and so so that's one of the first things is to get in community and if you don't have somebody in your local community getting community and social media or you know in a coaching circle whatever and so that that's one of the things but also starting to pick up those other skills you know nonviolent communication and there are restored of justice trainings that you know there are a lot of trains and skills that are not legal but are really helpful to the practice of law now restorative and there are approaches that have by maybe the same checklist that are to restore it up because it has a lot to do with the relationship so that in the most pure restored of justice movement i'll give you an example let's say that the neighbor's kid steals your purse right now in the old system let's go put him in juvenile detention and his life is ruined right i mean that's that's just come in the really old system they'd cut off his hands right right in the drive right you don't want your neighbor kid to drive be in the system but you also do what you're stuck back right and so on restart of justice they would bring the two of you together along with a facilitator and whoever else in the community made sense and so maybe there's a member of the neighborhood association is going to come in and sort of on behalf of all the neighbors and the kids got a soccer coach and the soccer coach is going to come in and you know the parents are going to come in and you know it's like let's create a circle of people who care about what happens to this kid right and then the care that actually you know after some work apologizes to you and everybody talks about you know about this kid and their hopes for him and then they they figure out what's going to make you whole again that's also going to restore him to be somebody that when you see him on the street you're going to think well of him and how do you reintegrate him into the neighborhood and so maybe he says he's going to mow your lawn all summer and that's you know that's his way of restoring your relationship and he's go give your stuff back or you know he spent the money and he's going to work and do chores for you you know you as a community restore that faith so that that's an example o now i have done a lot of restoring justice it at high levels because you know like if you're the victim it's a high level yes however as far as the training goes working with the kid in the neighborhood may not require as much training as working with a cycle assault or a murder case and a lot of that work isn't figuring out whether it's even appropriate and school doing the screening process to make sure that the victim is going to be revived demised and that there really is going to be a healing and i wanted to also ask you about your two books now lawyers says peacemakers  was published by the american bar association that indicates to me that the a b a is is open to this kind of thinking and vision that actually came to me and asked me to write it great so in two thousand and eight i started videotaping people and when i had about fifty different interviews up i got i was actually joking in you know the bit about two or three months and we post the up there on the internet and i was saying yeah any day now the american bar association is going to call me and they're going to want to book about this and a few days later they call the fed it was almost like i didn't believe it you know like who's who's pranking me here and they asked me i because they said that they had seen all of my work on the internet and they said they knew that this was the way law was going to go but they didn't know it come so far and i obviously had a broader view of what so so it was well received having said that you know there are couple million lawyers in the world and we haven't shifted that yet the there are a lot more than there were you know ten years ago and and i know thousands of lawyers who are operating in this way but it's a big world if there's maybe one very key message from your book what would that be and i know it's hard to narrow it down because of what the book went through all of these different approaches and then look to see what would be a match for the lawyer so that's i think the key message is that if you are practicing law that there is a way to do it it's an integrity for you no matter who you are or what law practice you're at gray thank you so much for joining me it's fascinating i could talk to you for hours and hours and hours unfortunately we we don't have much time left but thank you for coming to princeton and thank you for joining us for this edition of pro se nation if you have any suggestions for future topics or you'd like to be