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| 🍀 St. Patrick's Day Zoom. RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 |
In a hybrid meeting, "Faith and the Legal Field," CLS students in Dartmouth, Mass., and I were joined via Zoom by Anton Sorkin, director of law student ministries at the Christian Legal Society in Springfield, Va.; attorney J.A.A. Purves, Penner & Purves, Santa Barbara, Cal.; and Kathy Cooper, InterVarsity regional director for faculty and graduate ministries, working out of Brown University in Providence, R.I.
The new student organization and this panel in particular were the work product of the tireless Tiffany Trott-McKenna and her executive board, Sophia Chiotis, JuliaBianca Josen, Dream Whitaker, and Paul Steinman. They're all wonderful students whom soon I will miss when they graduate and begin law practice.
A veteran of the U.S. Marines, Trott-McKenna is a phenom I have been especially privileged to know in her time in law school. She serves also as president of the Black Law Students Association and member of the Veterans Law Association, and she will practice law in California after graduation.
Trott-McKenna asked the panelists to share their experiences with faith and law practice, and also asked for takeaways that might be useful as Christian law students transition to practice.
Purves talked about family practice and explained, for example, the distinctly professional role of the lawyer in a divorce case. Both faith and one's professional responsibility call for compassionate and informed counseling of a client seeking divorce, he said—even though marital reconciliation will spell the early end of the representation.
Sorkin spoke to the challenges of practicing in Big Law while maintaining ethical and moral lines, dictated by faith, that one won't cross. Constant vigilance and self-interrogation is required to resist the "win at any cost" mentality that too often dictates legal maneuvering. I'm reminded of Daniel 6:3.
For my part, I spoke of the temptation to bifurcate one's life into faith and secular work, and how I came to understand that no one, lawyers included, truly lives a life of faith while indulging that duplicity.
In takeaways, Cooper spoke to the importance of prayer to keep an even keel. Likewise, I talked about the importance of staying in the Word—while admitting that my track record isn't perfect, as daily struggles inevitably pull us all toward materialism and the secular. The important thing is to try, try again.
Trott-McKenna succeeded magnificently in navigating the bureaucracy to obtain official recognition of the CLS student group at the law school and in the university. I have been blessed to serve as the inaugural faculty adviser for the CLS group.
The group is not yet an official chapter of the national CLS organization. That will be a job for an up and coming new board. I look forward to CLS contributing vitally to the formation of law students' professional identity in the coming years.
