Lawyering and the Liberal Arts
As a lawyer teaching at a liberal arts college, I’m a bit of an odd duck. But my unusual academic pedigree has its advantages. Being an odd duck can give you the occasional odd insight. Here’s mine: There’s a deep connection between the practice of law and the discourse of liberal education. Properly understood, it can illuminate current debates regarding the nature of liberal education.
On my campus, the nature of liberal education is a perennially popular topic. From informal conversations over lunch to formal debates on the curriculum, the subject frequently gives rise to spirited exchanges. Still, the discourse here has an ongoing character, frequently engaged in but never drawn to a conclusion. This frustrates a colleague of mine who often expresses his displeasure at the inability of our faculty to reach a consensus on a matter so central to our mission.
It’s a frustration echoed by many scholars engaged in the broader, national discussion of the liberal arts. Even among those that hold it dear, liberal education is notoriously difficult to define. Diana Glyer and David L. Weeks write, “Does liberal education foster independence or interdependence, look to the past or the future, develop national identity or global citizenship, promote unity or diversity, cultivate moral or intellectual virtue, address urgent social problems or timeless human dilemmas, help students understand the world or motivate them to change it, inculcate respect for the eternal verities or nurture a spirit of skepticism, lead to personal introspection or promote social action?” Uneasily, they conclude, “The literature suggests liberal education does all of these things and more.”
Although I’ve long participated in debates on liberal education, I’ve yet to share this current frustration at their perennial nature. It’s not that I think consensus is unimportant. It’s rather that I believe on my campus and beyond, people are looking for consensus in the wrong places. It won’t be found in a particular model of liberal education or a specific curricular approach. It lies instead in the way we’ve chosen to talk to each other.
Surprisingly, this is something I learned in practicing law. Obviously, the practice of law requires skill in addressing conflicts. But a legal career also reveals how deeper than the law’s conflicts is the consensus that underlies them. Consensus here depends not on agreement regarding particular issues – indeed, as advocates, lawyers are often paid to disagree – but rather on a commitment to a common language. This is a commitment deeper than it initially appears.
Legal scholar James Boyd White captures the depth of this
commitment well. “
As I’ve immersed myself in the liberal education literature, I’ve become aware of how it too makes use of a distinctive language, one that, like the law’s, has its own “special-sounding words.” These words range, as Glyer and Weeks demonstrate, from “global citizenship” to “eternal verities,” from “diversity” to “intellectual virtue,” from “timeless human dilemmas” to “spirit of skepticism.” And similar to legal discourse, this language has a deeper import.
This distinctive language of liberal education helps those of us who use it to forge a common culture, one that provides “a set of resources for future speech and action, a set of ways of claiming meaning for experience.” When Glyer and Weeks ask: Does liberal education “help students understand the world or motivate them to change it” they are delineating two particular ways (and ignoring others) of claiming meaning in our lives. Our lives can gain significance, they imply, by achieving a deeper understanding of the world or altering its conditions for the better. Once established, these particular ways of claiming meaning serve as the basis for “future speech and action.” Thus, one professor argues for including a Non-Western cultures requirement in the curriculum, asserting it will “help students understand the world.” Another professor advocates service-learning, claiming the experience of an imperfect world will “motivate them to change it.” Whether their liberal arts colleagues agree with these arguments or not, these colleagues will recognize such arguments as among those deserving a response.
This distinctive language also helps to constitute the particular community of liberal education, one whose nature is especially evident at liberal arts colleges. When Glyer and Weeks speak, for example, the language of “personal introspection,” they help to mark a significant dimension of the character of relationships at liberal arts colleges. Much more than in a business or military hierarchy, the relationships at a liberal arts college have a reflective character. Rather than being simply proscribed authoritatively, they remain subject to the critical scrutiny of those engaged in them. Such relationships thus model the freedom that liberal education strives to promote.
With controversial issues in particular, the law is often less clear than those on either side might hope. But one of the insights the practice of law reinforces is the virtue of the law’s ambiguities. Linguistic ambiguities lead to practical uncertainties, to be sure. But they ultimately make manifest the law’s attempt to embrace more than a single-sided view of things, its efforts to be faithful to the complexity of the our lives and aspirations.
Nowadays, we live in an increasingly diverse society, with no lack of legal controversies. Advocates, for example, regularly invoke the Constitution in confronting issues ranging from gay marriage to affirmative action to assisted suicide. In doing so, they can find the Constitution’s ambiguities and uncertainties disappointing. But James Boyd White points to a more positive construction we might give to the complexities of the Constitution. “So understood, many of its ambiguities and uncertainties become more comprehensible; we can see it as attempting to establish a conversation of a certain kind, and its ambiguities as ways of at once defining and leaving open the topics of conversation.”
Viewed in this way, the ambiguities and uncertainties of the Constitution offer a clue for the development of liberal education, one that can make us more comfortable with the ongoing nature of its debates. If we see liberal education as, like the law, trying to establish “a conversation of a certain kind,” then the tensions within the discourse of liberal education that Glyer and Weeks identify appear in a new light. They are not deficiencies to be eliminated or remedied, but rather an intrinsic part of liberal education. They are ways of “at once defining and leaving open the topics” of its conversation.
Liberal education’s creative and open-textured discourse doesn’t render its coherence suspect. For its coherence resides in the deeper bonds of culture and community engendered by a common language. In the way we have chosen to talk to each other, we have found a way of embracing and exploring our differences. This is a powerful achievement.
From many quarters, liberal education today is under attack. In such a climate, it’s tempting to stick with simple, straightforward formulas. But it would be a mistake to promote liberal education by reductively defining it. We can better defend liberal education by being true to its distinctive conversation. This is a conversation that insists on the ambiguities and uncertainties that are part of any authentic life, that remains committed to the complexities of a free society. It’s a conversation that, I’m sure, has never been easy. But it’s one that, I’ve learned from a life in the law, is well worth pursuing.
Jeffrey Nesteruk
Professor of Legal Studies
Franklin &