Gavin: So why do you want to be a lawyer?
Associate: I believe in the law. I believe in honor and justice. I believe that people are by nature good…"
Gavin: I wanna hear what you say about the law after you work here for five or three years, a month, a week, a day, an hour…”
Until now, I wouldn't deny that I still have these lingering questions on why I want to be a lawyer if I already have this distorted impression on this profession; like I'm on this pedestal or on the edge of deciding to commit or not. And for what this is all worth.
Often times, we question people for their ideals, especially their quintessential views about things. We find it superficial and hard to understand, for instance, a young individual who says that he or she wanted to be a lawyer to be able to help poor people, or defend those suffering from injustice. These ideologies, though admirable, are often ridiculed because we think that it is unattainable and surreal, because we associate it with the reality that things do not really work that way.
To be something I am not is what I'm scared of. To be something that you're scared of, something you promised to be not. Sounds brutal to me.
What if, if I get out there equipped with my ideals and aspirations to do the good and then it turns out that everything about the law profession that I learned in school is a complete lie?
What if one day I am made to bribe another person to win a case? What if I become a defense lawyer of a bad person? By fact and experience, lawyering is filled with the most colorful lies and deception mastered by the art of articulation and persuasion by technicality.
The very perception of the legal profession is wherein lawyers are in the struggle of negotiating the contradictions of upholding their morals and securing their self-preservation, where principles are put to the test when they clash with the world of reality and where corruption and iniquities push to the edge. Decisions would greatly define what kind of person you are, and if you're willing to live by and with it.
True enough, the law profession is known for its reputation of decadence and depravity that [seems] inevitable to the mere nature of the profession. People have this duality of perception about lawyers: it's either they go out there and be heroes save the poor and the prejudiced from anguish or the more common unpleasant view—lawyers who lie, distort things and make out a living from cheating other people.
We have been faced with the fact that lawyers make big money and more often than not, depicted as heartless individuals with more regard for the law than the human being. To be a lawyer, you have to be strict with the rules and comportment because of dura lex, sed lex. However, we have to remember that the law stands for morality in its most basic sense, and morality comes from compassion and protection of the people under forlorn conditions. If the law is upheld to the extremes of its rigidity, in the same way of what it is trying to avoid, will cause injustice, tyranny and intolerance. The law is made by the people to bring lives in order and if the law is used to discriminate against them, it is not living up to its purpose to protect the people.
The law is harsh but what makes it 'more harsh' are the lawyers choosing to defend the interests of the partisan by bending the law in favor of them. It is always noble to remember that the pecuniary side is only incidental to the legal profession and it should not distort our sense of morality just to achieve material things for a certain group of people. That's probably why the world has nothing good to say about lawyers, in literature, philosophical and all other scripts, the latter are always perceived as one of the most evil creatures in the planet.
But can we blame them? This impression has been founded on many cases where lawyers has worked their way to glory by cheating and stepping on the rights of other people, and even get paid amply for it.
The law is a powerful tool to create order and also destroy it. Lawyers know this, because they are learned in finding thousands of alternatives to solving a problem or getting out of it, regardless if legal or not. An ordinary person would not know. Lawyers can turn black to white and white to black or even gray and colorful if they intend to, to the prejudice of another person.
I am afraid for myself if I become a lawyer, I would just turn all the other things around. I wouldn't know. I also wouldn't promise that I will always be good, because no one can achieve that. We only try and strive to be good and we will always strive for it.
We are in the continuous struggle of doing what is right, because it is the ONLY thing we can do, to be better. At the end of the day, what we do as a person and as a human, whether we are lawyers or not, should always be moral and honorable, not merely a course of intellect. It's one thing worth battling for. We labor to be "good" as a person and treat other people the same. There are lawyers because they should make things right and dispense justice, give people what they deserve and not the other way around. The legal profession is fighting for what's right and advance the welfare of not only for the life of one people, or for the subsistence of interests of a certain group of people. It has to anchor on the welfare of the people as a whole, most especially to those people who are unfortunate and those who have less in life.
The legal profession, to my opinion, has a very challenging road, to taking its supposed integrity back. For this country, I still have yet to know. With the complexities of human transaction, depravity circumventing with the dominance of the upper and middle class, injustice would still remain and that's where lawyers take ground. The legal profession should define lawyers, not the lawyers defining the profession itself. Right now, it's the latter. Ironically, many lawyers have no regard for human rights when in fact; it is what the law is trying to aim for. So it brings us to the question: To whom lawyers are working for? Is it for the spirit of justice? Or for the spirit of the client? Or just the spirit of their selfish ambition?
The legal profession seems to be in need of salvation—in need of students with a noble aspiration of serving the injusticed and not only to make money out of the profession; in need of educators who encourage young people that they can make a change and they are valuable to uphold the integrity of law and for what purpose it serves; in need of more emphasis on sense of morality, honesty and rectitude; in need of a fostering environment where people are taught the principles of right and wrong and how to balance them.
The law is all too powerful just like the ambition to do good. And they are both just hard to achieve.
The hope is, to remember that we all started pure, and that we promised to defend humanity, otherwise we are just another useless and wasted intellect, a rubbish this dreadful society doesn't anymore need.
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