The Project for Integrating Spirituality, Law, and Politics is an outgrowth of the Law Task Force of the Foundation for Ethics and Meaning (FEM). For eight years, since the first meeting of the FEM in Washington in 1996, the Law Task Force has held conferences, written magazine and law review articles, and conducted panels in contexts such as the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). The emphasis is on the need for a new conception of law based on non-market values. The work seeks to emphasize the need to transform the adversary system, to change the values in private and public law to include a more holistic and ecological vision of socially just conduct, and to transform the ethical code of the legal profession away from a narrow conception of client self-interest and toward a conception that reconciles the needs of clients with social responsibility, ecological awareness, and the creation of a communal, socially connected world.

The Law Task Force transformed itself into the independent Project for Integrating Spirituality, Law, and Politics in the summer of 2001, when some 30 “Spiritual/Political” legal activists gathered for the first of two annual retreats to synthesize the work of previous years in the creation of a new organization. Under the leadership of Peter Gabel and former Task Force chair Nanette Schorr, a legal services attorney currently practicing in the South Bronx, the Project operates through Peter Gabel’s Institute for Spirituality and Politics at New College of California. New College of California, of which Peter was president for some twenty years, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and 32-year old progressive college committed to linking education with the creation of a just, sacred, and sustainable world. Peter remains a law professor at New College’s nationally renowned public-interest law school, as well as serving as Director of the Institute for Spirituality and Politics.

The philosophy of the Project derives from a developing new vision of the nature of both human reality and of social transformation that originated primarily in the work of Peter Gabel and Rabbi Michael Lerner and came to be called The Politics of Meaning. This vision owes much to the idealistic experience of the movements of the 1960s and begins with the belief that human beings are fundamentally motivated by more than economic and material interests.

Our view is that as much as the need for food and shelter, every person longs for an authentic connection to others through which people’s essential spiritual goodness and loving capacities can be recognized, affirmed, and socially validated. In order to bring such a world into existence, however, those who pursue progressive social change must shake off the constraint of thinking solely in terms of economic and political inequality and focus more deeply on developing a healing-centered paradigm that addresses the pervasive alienation and isolation that underlies the spiritual distortions in social relations that in turn lead to economic and political injustice.

Rather than seeking to address and attempt to heal the widespread alienation in society, our existing adversarial legal system reinforces the climate of mistrust, self-interest, and materialism that blocks the creation of a loving and caring world. Our conviction is that law and legal culture could and should be a central public arena in which to foster empathy and understanding across the wider society, in which to reawaken a sense of the sacredness of the natural world and of existence itself, which we regard as a precondition to the prevention of widespread and perhaps catastrophic ecological destruction.

The challenge involves calling upon the legal profession to develop and strengthen its role as a helping profession, to act in ways that earn the respect of those it serves, and, in fact, to provide a moral presence for clients in their own decision making. This requires lawyers to take affirmative steps to dispel perceptions that they act as technocrats who manipulate rules for the benefit of the highest bidder. Such an approach calls for fostering methods of conflict resolution that facilitate healing and reduce the perpetuation of destructive behavior. It also is a call to deepen the ethical content of legal education, to redefine the working ethics of the profession, and to humanize both the content of law and the conduct of legal proceedings so as to promote truth-telling, compassion, reconciliation, and responsibility for the well-being of the other, as well as the self.

Members of the Project have come to share in this vision from both the spiritual and political worlds. Some of us came to realize with the collapse of socialism as the dominant universalist metaphor for community that a spiritual turn, a turn toward connecting the inner and the outer, was what was needed to advance the high and hopeful ideals that socialism so long stood for throughout the world (in spite of distortions and even atrocities committed in its name). Others have come not from a political background that previously would have been understood as an effort to change the “external” dimensions of social injustice, but rather have come from spiritual and religious backgrounds or communities in which the realization of the deep inner longings of the human soul provided the main point of reference for their own identities in the world.

Still others may wish to advance the vision of a just society that could be seen to undergird the ideals expressed historically through such “self-evident” truths as that we are all created equal, endowed with certain rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Indeed it is the blend of spiritual and political activism, and the cross-fertilization of the encounter between these two historically separated universes, that distinguishes our group from virtually all other spiritual or political movements within law. Our aim is precisely to develop a legal theory and practice that unites the spiritual and the political and seeks to bring about a transformation of legal culture that can best advance the creation of a loving, just, and socially connected world.

If we had to express in a single sentence the philosophical orientation that guides our work, it would be that legal culture must transform itself to become worthy of the formulation offered by Martin Luther King, Jr., when he defined justice as “Love correcting that which revolts against love.”