VII. Sunday Evening: Transforming Legal Education (II)

We held the final substantive session Sunday evening after dinner, in which Cheryl Conner made a beautiful and thought-provoking presentation about her efforts at Suffolk University Law School in Boston to transform students through a course accompanying her work as a hands-on clinical law professor. While the previous session on transforming law practice had focused on developing our vision of how lawyers should act in new ways to integrate spirituality, law, and politics, Cheryl’s concluding presentation focused on the transformation of what might be called the legal state of consciousness. As a Buddhist practitioner who has also been an Assistant United States Attorney, Cheryl told the story of her course—entitled “ Reflective Lawyer: Peace Training for Lawyers”—to convey to us the importance of transforming one’s Being so as to alter the quality of presence that one brings to every legal context, no matter how “ traditional” the outside appearance of the context might be. Cheryl’s contribution to our process was to convey how the inner and the transformation of the inner can affect any outer manifestation of legal reality.

In a striking contrast to all the other classes taking place within her law school, Cheryl’s Reflective-Lawyer class convened in what she called a “ sacred circle,” and students were encouraged to re-experience and explore their states of mind and emotion in relation to both law school and their clinical placements. While from a content perspective the course explored Eastern and Western teachings about the nature of suffering and injustice, most significant was the experimentation Cheryl risked in engaging the students in meditation, contemplation, and prayer. In the law school context, this was a truly radical experience that involved considerable risk.

Cheryl reported that students felt a great sense of relief as they were able to let down their functional external selves and allow themselves to be seen and heard fully as human for the first time in law school. For many, there developed a newfound curiosity about the parts of their minds that were not simply thinking like a lawyer. Not infrequently tears and anxiety were loosened from within and freed, as space was made, for the sharing of deep experience within the safety of an intimate circle.

One young man considered whether he could have compassion for his criminal defendant-client as he sat in the courtroom not knowing that next to him sat the defendant’s family. He joined them with tears at the pronouncement of the sentence and shared with the rest of the circle the effect on him and on the family of someone in the role of lawyer crying with the community of the affected person. Another shared the scariness of engaging in a quiet challenge within a prosecutor’s office over the appropriateness of the office-wide competition for who brought the most prosecutions and “won” the longest sentences. One woman student examined how her increased capacity for identifying logical weaknesses had altered her mind in ways that had made her a relentless critic at home and with her friends. Another woman student working in a juvenile court was able to wonder openly whether any of the eight lawyers involved in a child custody case had ever looked the child in the eyes or shown warmth to any of her family members.

The students kept weekly journals in which they gradually opened their hearts and in which their highest desires and aspirations as well as their most painful frustrations flowed more and more easily as the class, the circle, proceeded as a gathering over the course of the semester. Cheryl encouraged moments of collective silence in the class—just as she allowed us moments of silence during her own presentation—and her quite striking way of speaking to us (being unafraid to pause, for example) made it clear that integrating spirituality, law, and politics calls for invoking ways of being together that permit the intuitive/emotional/spiritual dimension of one’s responses to human difficulty and suffering to actually be experienced by the student or practitioner or listener.

In this respect, Cheryl’s talk provided a heartening closure to our retreat as a whole and to our discussion of the meaning of “practice” in particular. Whatever our agenda for developing in greater detail the transformations that must occur in the range of legal phenomena that we had analyzed over the course of the retreat prior to Cheryl’s talk, her talk itself made clear that we must incorporate into that agenda spiritual techniques for allowing the unalienated longings of the self to emerge into the present moment.