Hands Held Where Hands Were Tied
Judge Joseph R. Goodwin
Imagine the fire it took.
A lawyer in Philadelphia, the summer of 1776, putting his name to a sentence that called the King a tyrant. He knew what his signature meant. If the thing failed, that was his confession, and the confession was the noose. He signed anyway. Because something in his gut had decided that a government by the people was worth his neck.
That fire is what made him a lawyer in the American sense, and not a clerk of someone else’s commands.
There were a great many lawyers in that room of revolution. More lawyers than any other profession. Eleven years later, lawyers again dominated the Constitutional Convention. The American rule of law did not happen to include lawyers. Lawyers helped create it and have been its principal custodians ever since.
Handling the law every day teaches the difference between two things that look alike from the outside.
Law as command. Law as covenant.
Command is the ruler’s will written down. Covenant is something different. It is the people’s agreement to hold themselves, and those who govern them, equally subject to the same rules.
King George was reaching for obedience. The founders were reaching for freedom. And freedom is not the absence of law. It is the covenant binding all alike. That is the deeper revolution, beyond the break with England. They transformed law from a command handed down into a bond held in common.
That covenant among free people is the profession’s inheritance.
There is no better time than now to stoke that old fire. The profession caught it early, carried it forward, and holds it still. What lawyers helped create, lawyers remain bound to keep.
The law is not the ruler’s command. It is the people’s covenant. It ties their hands together instead of tying them down, and joins them in the common cause of freedom.
Lawyers lit this fire. On the Fourth of July, of all days, they should feel its warmth.
