A Perspective on Professional Responsibilities
Editor’s Note: This piece was originally submitted as part of Osgoode’s Ethical Lawyering in a Global Community course.
Growing up, I was taught that storytellers are the most powerful people in the world. Lawyers, like traditional storytellers, occupy a privileged place in society which gives their stories special significance.
We have been told over and over that learning the law is like learning a new language and I am starting to understand that the name of that language is power.
Historically, lawyers have used their power as the storytellers of our society both to aid in the struggle for access to justice and to deny justice to disadvantaged groups. I think that good lawyering requires all of us to think self-consciously about the privilege and power we have as storytellers.
Some stories told by lawyers, such as colonial narratives or justifications for “improving” colonized populations, have had far reaching and catastrophic consequences. We should remember that John A. Macdonald was a lawyer as well as a law-maker when he said that thousands of Indigenous children should be stripped away from their families and forced to attend residential schools in order to “acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.”
And yet, the anguish and memories of those 6,000 witnesses whose stories were told in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report were silenced until very recently. Moreover, the legal profession participated in the residential school project, presumably by providing legal services to the colonial state, but also in aiding the state to create fictions that tucked away Indigenous agency and suffering within narratives of “discovery” and “confederation.”
The stories that lawyers have told about sovereignty and ownership have literally reshaped the landscape of Turtle Island. The idea that the existing Indigenous population was not European enough to have “true” ownership of the land, was identified in the TRC Report as a fundamental tension in the legitimacy of the Euro-Canadian state.
As Constance Backhouse points out, there were many arguments available within the Western European legal tradition that should have been put forward to challenge the colonizers’ self-proclaimed sovereignty over Indigenous peoples and their land. Whether or not the state operates this way today, the story of colonialism is out in the world, and “once a story is told it cannot be called back.” In the end, no role is as powerful as that of the storyteller.
As storytellers, the legal profession has an obligation to the profession as a whole to rewrite patriarchal-colonial norms, wherever possible, with something new. As Backhouse contends, the fact that the profession has historically been dominated by white-male-protestant homogeneity is detrimental to the cause of justice.
When people are excluded from the profession on the basis of their race, gender or class, the profession itself is less able to meet the needs of the public. Our professional obligations necessitate a plurality of voices participating in decisions about what good lawyering looks like. If there is only one story being told, the system cannot be suitably improved or altered. After reading Backhouse, it is clear that old exclusionary conceptions of the profession are not helpful to us anymore.
In conceiving of lawyers as storytellers, the emphasis is on the power of our words and our ideas. It is because of this power wielded by the profession that we need to engage in careful reflection about the stories we put out into the world and the stories that we leave unchallenged.
One day, when we are called to the bar, we will be asked to swear an oath. We will also swear to serve the cause of access to justice and to improve the administration of justice. This is the story that the Law Society wants us to keep close in our minds. The swearing of the oath demonstrates the simultaneously public and personal nature of the decisions we make about our professional ethics.
Being a storyteller is about tapping into the very things that make us human. As King says, “the truth about stories is that’s all we are.” The stories we tell and the ones we internalize eventually come to define us. Every storyteller needs to remember the power of their words and ideas in shaping the world.