As we've evolved into a truly multicultural polity, made up of a widely diverse collection of races, religions and ethnicities, the law has been the touchstone of our common interests, the ultimate instrument for negotiating the rules that ensure equal rights and equal protections for every single citizen. The jokes about lawyers got nastier than ever. Yet a funny thing happened on the way to a lawyer-less forum. Lo and behold, for example, after years of hearing how Japan's economic prowess was a reflection of a consensus-style culture in which lawyers and litigation weren't needed, we now find Japan itself taking a different tack. From Malaysia to Indonesia to the Republic of China and the successor Republics of the old Soviet Union, we are once again being reminded that free markets are inextricably linked to free societies, and that freedom, like nature, abhors a vacuum.
Freedom requires a context.
It seems obvious that for any nation to achieve long-term, sustainable economic progress, then there must be a clear focus on building and maintaining the underlying legal and constitutional underpinnings without which those markets cannot thrive or survive. Now it's not my purpose here to encourage you to go job hunting in Kuala Lumpur or Kazakhstan. Of course, neither is it my purpose to discourage you from trying out those venues. From what I'm told, the winters in Kuala Lumpur are a lot milder than in Albany or Buffalo. Rather, my purpose is to remind you that while the legal framework we enjoy in the United States is a precious part of our political and economic freedoms, the ultimate guarantee of its worth is not in the quantity of the nation's lawyers, but in their quality, in who you are and in the ideals you live by, in your resolve to be women and men of professional integrity, in your commitment to play by the rules and be guided by conscience, not convenience, in your capacity to stand up for justice, even when that means going against popular opinion or political pressure or the whims of the media, in your willingness to represent not merely the wealthy and the privileged but the voiceless and the powerless, the people at the margins, those who it's always easy to ignore or exclude or condemn.