A Tribute to Robert F. Drinan, S.J.: A Deeply Ethical Man

Transcription

1 A Tribute to Robert F. Drinan, S.J.: A Deeply Ethical Man CARRIE MENKEL-MEADOW* Father Drinan was my office next-door neighbor for twelve years and my colleague, friend, and mentor in legal ethics and social justice for several decades before that. Like many, I had come to know him initially during the Watergate era, when he was the first to call for President Nixon s impeachment, not for the Watergate break-in (that came later) but because of his crime and misdemeanor of ordering bombing in Cambodia during the Viet Nam war. I was an anti-war protester in those years who came to Washington often to march and to listen to speeches, from Philadelphia where I was a law student. So, I first encountered brave Father Drinan from afar on the television screen during impeachment hearings and congressional deliberation and as the outspoken cleric who made speeches against the war and in favor of human rights. Not too much later, shortly after Father Drinan was forced to de-camp from his political office by Pope John Paul II (in 1980), we served together on the Board of Directors of the Society of American Law Teachers ( SALT ), which was founded during the Viet Nam war era to take votes and public stands (and write amicus briefs) on progressive issues of legal and public importance when the more neutral professional association of law professors, the Association of American Law Schools, would not take public stands. I was a newbie a young, feminist, clinical, progressive, and reformist law professor. He was far more radical than I, urging that we write briefs and take positions whenever he saw an injustice and thought that lawyers and law professors should speak out. I watched and learned from him with awe and deep respect. Like many who have paid tribute to Father Drinan following his death, he was a hero in my family for his politics and for his commitments to his expression of Catholic social justice and its role in the world. As the daughter of a Catholic father and a Jewish mother, I was raised in a secular religion, Ethical Culture, but when I joined the Georgetown faculty in 1992, Father Drinan became my priest, my spiritual advisor, my colleague in legal ethics, and my political fellow traveler. Though he was Bob to most of his colleagues, he remained Father Drinan to me the wise, kind, avuncular, and jocular older man who became my personal vision of God in the world. (In Ethical Culture we say God is spelled with two o s, and Father Drinan personified this.) I sought advice from him on many issues, introduced him to my Catholic nieces (to whom he gave Ben & Jerry s ice cream coupons, as he did for so many of the Law Center s children), and shared a daily conversation about the state of the world (and, occasionally, the state of the legal profession or the legal * A B. Chettle Jr. Professor of Law, Dispute Resolution and Civil Procedure, Georgetown University Law Center. 2007, Carrie Menkel-Meadow. 1713

2 1714 THE GEORGETOWN LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 95:1713 academy). Every morning for the last ten years or so, Father Drinan would bound into my office for a hug and a question Carrie, do you have any good news for the Democrats? since my husband, a Democratic pollster, was supposed to hold the data and key to good news (Democrats in power) for most of the 1990s and hopes for changing the tide in the early 2000s. We would either sigh together or grin, depending on the news, and often I would sit in his office to watch television with him when a major political event occurred. We watched the first World Trade Center building fall together on the television he kept in his office, a place of comfortable clutter of books, awards, and pictures and plaques of Father Drinan s many political, religious, and academic accomplishments. I often asked him pretty serious and probing questions about his views on abortion, the priestly pedophiles, and why he had listened to the Pope when he was asked to resign his beloved role in Congress. He had serious answers to all of these questions, but also delivered them with humor, including the famous story about whether the Pope would have asked him to resign if he had known who was going to succeed him. 1 But ultimately Father Drinan s answers were always tied to a profoundly ethical and religious commitment to the value of human life and the challenge of ensuring a better quality of life for everyone (including the pedophiles, whom he believed could still be treated). In the last year or so those daily hugs had me holding a frailer and frailer being, so I knew our time together was probably drawing to a close. He would often say to me, Every day over 80 is gravy from God, so I knew he was ready to meet his Maker, but I was not ready to say goodbye to the corporeal form of a being who inspired me and so many others every day. Indeed, I often asked him if he would speak at my funeral, hoping that he would long outlive many who were younger than him. He was our omnipresent blesser of good works and good people at Georgetown and elsewhere. Like many in our Georgetown family, I asked him to officiate at a variety of professional and personal events he gave the benediction at my Chair inauguration and he often came to my home to honor others of our colleagues wedding celebrations, book parties, christenings, and baptisms, as well as bar and bat mitzvahs. In addition to presiding at Mass at the Law Center, he gave hundreds of prayers at graduations and other important events at the Law Center almost always linking God s desires for human justice and well-being to the work that lawyers had to do in the world. He thanked us for our good works. In having to say goodbye, like many others, I have reflected on so many memories and times of inspiration. I will write of just a few here, exemplifying what I think most characterized Father Drinan his commitment to human rights around the world, as well as at home, inspired by his priest s love for all of God s creatures, his commitment to ensuring an ethical legal profession, where ethics means doing the right thing, not necessarily the rule-determined 1. Barney Frank, (D. Mass), an openly gay man and every bit as progressive as Father Drinan.

3 2007] IN MEMORIAM:ROBERT F. DRINAN, S.J thing, and his deep and sincere love and concern for all human beings. One of Father Drinan s many legacies is the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, which he founded in 1987 as the first law review (and student edited) devoted solely to legal ethics and professional responsibility. Legal ethics as a field is also a result of the Watergate scandal, and Robert F. Drinan (D. Mass) was there at its birth. 2 During his testimony before the Watergate investigatory committee in Congress, White House counsel John Dean (GULC 65) brought a list of names of those involved in the cover up some of those names were starred and others were not. As the congressional questioners sought to understand some nefarious pattern in the starred names, John Dean surprised all by saying he had simply starred the names of all the lawyers who had been involved in legal wrongdoing. He was trying to understand why so many lawyers had done wrong. Well, the rest is, as they say, history. But with that public scar on the reputation of the legal profession, the American Bar Association soon added a new requirement for law school accreditation every student was to take a required course in Professional Responsibility before graduation. 3 It was no accident that two active participants in the congressional investigation of Watergate s legal wrongdoing were or became Georgetown faculty members and helped to found the field of Legal Ethics Robert Drinan and Samuel Dash (counsel to the Watergate impeachment committee). These two men taught some of the nation s first classes in Professional Responsibility and began to contribute to a growing body of scholarship that explored not just the rules of the profession but the meaning of the lawyer s role and what it meant to practice law and seek justice. The Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics quickly became the most significant publication on legal ethics in the country. Father Drinan was actively engaged with all the student editors, urging them that to be ethical was to publish ON TIME and he presided over a mandatory pro bono time commitment for all student editors. In addition to suggesting a wide variety of symposia and student note topics over the years, he actively pursued book reviews of notable books in the field, especially noting the work of his colleagues Sam Dash, Sherman Cohn, David Luban, Mitt Regan, Heidi Feldman, Michael Frisch, and myself 4 who had come to make Georgetown the leading 2. Robert F. Drinan, Foreword: Legal Ethics from : Golden Age or a Decade of Decline, 6 GEO.J.LEGAL ETHICS 693 (1993). 3. American Bar Association, Standards: Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools, Standard 302(a)(5) ( ), available at pdf. 4. See e.g., MILTON C. REGAN, JR., EAT WHAT YOU KILL: THE FALL OF A WALL STREET LAWYER (2004); Sherman L. Cohn, The Organizational Client: Attorney-Client Privilege and the No-Contact Rule, 10 GEO. J. LEGAL ETHICS 739 (1997); Heidi Li Feldman, Beyond the Model Rules: The Place of Examples in Legal Ethics, 12 GEO. J. LEGAL ETHICS 409 (1999); Michael S. Frisch, No Stone Left Unturned: The Failure of Attorney Self-Regulation in the District of Columbia, 18 GEO. J.LEGAL ETHICS 325 (2005); David Luban, Rediscovering Fuller s Legal Ethics, 11 GEO. J. LEGAL ETHICS 801 (1998); Carrie Menkel-Meadow, Toward A Theory of Reciprocal Responsibility Between Clients and Lawyers: A Comment on David Wilkins Do Clients Have Ethical Obligations to Lawyers? Some Lessons from the

4 1716 THE GEORGETOWN LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 95:1713 law school in legal ethics scholarship. He loved the Journal as if it was his own child (and he had many honorary children). He wanted it to publish good works and encourage good lawyer practices. So, you can imagine my surprise when one day he bounded into my office, not for a hug, but for a request. Stephen Glass, a Georgetown 2L who had publicly acknowledged falsifying articles he had written as a journalist for the New Republic, 5 had, after our annual law student writing competition for law review editorships (an anonymously graded process), been selected by the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, on the basis of his writing and citechecking performance, to be an editor. The student board of editors did not want such an unethical person to be one of its members and Father Drinan, who believed that everyone deserved a second chance, especially if they confessed and were remorseful, asked if I would represent him in some sort of proceeding he was crafting for the Journal, a proceeding to give Stephen Glass some due process. We had a spirited debate about wrongdoing, forgiveness, predictions about future bad acts, a lawyer s duty of candor and I declined to represent Mr. Glass (because of my own convictions about the relationship of falsified journalism to student law review editorship). Father Drinan was disappointed in me, as I had previously represented civil rights plaintiffs, many convicted prisoners, and other unpopular clients. What kind of a role model will you be for young lawyers who have to learn to represent the unpopular? Doesn t everyone deserve a second chance? But Father Drinan found someone else to represent Mr. Glass and he forgave me instantly. Years later, this incident was recalled to me as I heard Father Drinan pray for the soul of Augusto Pinochet, the despised dictator of Chile, whose human rights violations were never fully prosecuted, as he died before being brought to justice. We must pray for the souls of all human beings, including those who have done wrong because that is the meaning of Christian love. Father Drinan denounced wrongdoing wherever he saw it but he forgave, often with the hope that everyone could be made better with prayer and proper religious, social, and political ministry. Father Drinan put his mind and body behind his convictions. One of the last subjects we talked about was human rights in South America, where I would soon be traveling. Father s map of Freedom in the World is still on his door; we looked at all the places he had gone to witness and report on human rights violations (Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador) and the places he had gone to monitor democratic elections (Ukraine). He was buoyant. Despite our displeasure with the state of the world (the war in Iraq, the on-going struggles in the Middle East, the ethnic conflicts and genocides in Eastern Europe, Northern Diversity Wars, 11 GEO. J. LEGAL ETHICS 901 (1998); Milton C. Regan, Jr., Legal Ethics: A Corporate Compliance Model, 19 GEO. J. LEGAL ETHICS 313 (2006); John D. Feerick, What s Fair: Ethics for Negotiators, 18 GEO. J. LEGAL ETHICS 251 (2004) (reviewing WHAT S FAIR: ETHICS FOR NEGOTIATORS (Carrie Menkel-Meadow & Michael Wheeler eds., 2004)). 5. See e.g., SHATTERED GLASS (Lions Gate Films 2003) for the story of Stephen Glass s rapid rise in journalism and precipitous fall because of fabricated stories.

5 2007] IN MEMORIAM:ROBERT F. DRINAN, S.J Ireland, and many areas of Africa), there were more freedom spots than when Father Drinan first started working. His book, The Mobilization of Shame, 6 has contributed so much to the many current struggles against international human rights violations. But Father Drinan, for all of his ethereal worldliness (I will mostly remember him with a suitcase in his hand, all the way to the end), never forgot our domestic issues. As an expert in legal ethics he spent years giving depositions about the wrongdoing of the tobacco lawyers who had refused to produce smoking gun (what an irony!) documents in the litigation against tobacco manufacturers, evidencing the harm of cigarettes and taking strong stands on the lawyer s duty to disgorge harmful documents when they were rightfully demanded. He taught an advanced seminar in legal ethics that often met on Saturday mornings and urged generations of law students to take up important issues of representation of the disempowered and subordinated. He had been in Congress and active in the creation of the Legal Services Corporation Act. He urged students to write about, then represent, the legal issues of the poor, those discriminated against, those with little voice or power in our system. When an important legal or social problem came up, he would bellow, in his classes and in his office, And what are you going to do about it? To his more academically oriented colleagues, when they had an idea about how to change the world, he would tell them, Write a book about it! As he told me when I was working on international dispute resolution and deliberative democracy: Don t just write an article, he said, write a book show the world how they can behave better! He meant the real world, with real people, not only academics writing for each other. Father Drinan has received many, many awards for his humanitarian, legal, religious, professional, and ethical service, but for me he will always be remembered as a model of humble ethical and humanitarian commitment. In recent years, when I taught a weekend course on international conflict resolution with complex world crisis simulations, Father Drinan was always in the building he would stop and listen to what we were talking about and during our class breaks he would say to the students, Thank you for your good work. Here in our little neighborhood of the southeast corner of the fourth floor of the McDonough building of Georgetown University Law Center, we cannot imagine that Father Drinan will not come striding out of his office and into ours with reports of human rights activities, lawyers ethical transgressions, a new book of his own, a suggestion of some work for us or our students, a present for our children or family members, and most characteristically, declamations about the state of the world. He was a constant presence of committed goodness, political and ethical commitment for humankind, for the American and United Nations dreams of social and economic justice and peace, for a world free from want and injustice, and also, for our institution and its human family. Although 6. ROBERT F. DRINAN,THE MOBILIZATION OF SHAME:AWORLD VIEW OF HUMAN RIGHTS (2001).

6 1718 THE GEORGETOWN LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 95:1713 Georgetown will never be the same without him, here in our little corner of the world, his presence will be with us forever. I know that, with a smile on his face, and a hope that we will continue his good works, he will be watching over us. Let us dedicate ourselves to continuing his good works and appreciation for all that human beings could be. Godspeed, my Father, you are finally at rest, but your colleagues, your students, your constituents, and your families... will continue to work in your name.