9 - A midrash on Rabbi Shaffer and Rabbi Trollope

Summary

In this Propter Honoris Respectum, I want to begin by quoting from a review that I had the pleasure of writing some years ago of one of Tom Shaffer's books:

Thomas Shaffer is the most unusual, and in many ways the most interesting, contemporary writer on American legal ethics. A lawyer impatient with legalisms and hostile to rights-talk, a moral philosopher who despises moral philosophy, a Christian theologian who refers more often to the rabbis than to the Church Fathers, a former law school dean who is convinced that law schools have failed their students by teaching too much law and too little literature, a traditionalist who wholeheartedly embraces feminism, an apologist for the conservative nineteenth-century gentleman who describes his own politics as “left of center,” Shaffer is a complex thinker who, I suspect, takes more than a little pleasure in the contradictions he bestraddles. In any event, Shaffer has produced a series of books and articles on professional ethics written with profundity, gentility, and polemical passion.

All of Shaffer's work that I know (and that is only a small fraction of his dozen books and 300 articles) could bear the title of one of his most famous books: On Being a Christian and a Lawyer. As Shaffer has written elsewhere, “People show what their morals are by claiming where they come from,” and, more briefly, “Belonging explains reality.” Where Shaffer comes from is the “community of the faithful” to which he belongs.