2 - Lawyers as upholders of human dignity (when they aren't busy assaulting it)

Summary

The many grounds for the excellence of human nature reported by many men failed to satisfy me – that man is the intermediary between creatures, the intimate of the gods, the king of the lower beings, by the acuteness of his senses, by the discernment of his reason, and by the light of his intelligence the interpreter of nature, the interval between fixed eternity and fleeting time, and (as the Persians say) the bond, nay, rather, the marriage song of the world, on David's testimony but little lower than the angels. Admittedly great though these reasons be, they are not the principal grounds, that is, those which may rightfully claim for themselves the privilege of the highest admiration.

Pico della Mirandella, Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486)

A few months ago I had dinner with a litigation partner from a famously combative Washington law firm that specializes in white-collar defense – a firm that has often been the last resort of officials in trouble. She asked me what I was working on, and I told her that I've been thinking about human dignity and its connection with law. I halfway expected the neutral, wary response that practical people often have toward rarefied philosophical issues – the cautious response appropriate when your dinner companion explains that he's been brooding over the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Instead, she smiled and replied, “That's extremely interesting to me, because defending human dignity is what I do every single day.”