Enabling the Citizen Lawyer — from jordanfurlong.substack.com by Jordan Furlong
We’ve neglected the second half of lawyers’ professional identity: the civic duty to serve society, defend the rule of law, and support public institutions. It’s time we restored it to equal billing.
So, what are those particular citizenship duties that lawyers owe to society? To my mind, it comes down to defending and advancing the rule of law. In practical terms, that means lawyers bear the primary responsibility to:
- Uphold constitutional values,
- Support vital public institutions,
- Enable universal access to justice,
- Demand accountability from power holders,
- Lead truth and reconciliation, and
- Help ensure peace, order, and good government.
Lawyers possess a unique combination of legal knowledge, professional status, institutional access, and proximity to power. That gives us a distinctive, and I’d argue heightened, responsibility to safeguard the rule of law.
It’s that our duty to society, as lawyer citizens, is equally as important as our duty to clients as legal practitioners — that our civic role and our commercial role are each central to our professional identity and should have equivalent priority in our professional lives.