Court Opinion

ID: 9782347
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-30 18:23:12.931486+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:34:56.778199
License: Public Domain

*332OPALA, J.,
dissenting in part.
¶ 1 This case is neither about rape nor about remorse. It is all about a dispassionate assessment of appropriate discipline to be imposed upon a lawyer who admits to having had a short-lived affair with a client, a then-vulnerable adult female with questionable capacity for consenting to sexual intimacy-
¶ 2 I join and enthusiastically welcome the Bar’s increased protection of the lawyers’ clientele from sexual predators in the profession. Administering excessive discipline in a few cases is not the way to accomplish the Bar’s desired goal. Consistent and evenhanded enforcement of discipline is to be preferred over an occasional splash of overpowering fervor.1 Law is not a moral discipline that measures the degree of one’s civil culpability by ecclesiastical standards for gauging the gravity of man’s sin.2 Viewed in realistic terms, law is an instrument of social control with its own norms of fairness and propriety.3
¶ 3 I concur in today’s pronouncement that subjects the respondent to professional discipline but dissent from imposition of the lengthy suspension. Respondent’s license should be suspended for a shorter period.

. State ex rel. Oklahoma Bar Ass'n v. Sopher, 1993 OK 55, 852 P.2d 707, 711 (Opala, J., dissenting).

. Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson, 343 U.S. 495, 506, 72 S.Ct. 777, 783, 96 L.Ed. 1098 (1952); Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U.S. 488, 81 S.Ct. 1680, 6 L.Ed.2d 982 (1961); Guinn v. Church of Christ of Collinsville, 1989 OK 8, 775 P.2d 766, 770.

. Hans Kelsen, what is justice?: Justice, Law, And Politics In The Mirror Of Science 1, 1, 4 (1957); Hans Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State 8-9 (Harvard University Press, 1945); Lon L. Fuller, The Morality Of Law 9 (2d ed.1969).