In Good Faith: Lawyers look for ways to work religiously.

By Bill Blum
     
      Score one for God. Amid polarizing debates over such hot-button issues as abortion rights, gay marriage, and intelligent design, Pepperdine Law School professor Robert Cochran is promoting religion as a means of bringing attorneys together to practice law in a more cooperative, compassionate, and productive way.
     
      Cochran is the head of Pepperdine's Institute on Law, Religion, and Ethics, which he founded in 2003. With 16 participating faculty members-including former Clinton special prosecutor Ken Starr, the law school's dean-the institute has hosted three two-day annual conferences. The first one, in 2004, raised the provocative question: "Can the ordinary practice of law be a religious calling?" This was followed by a conference on social justice and another on peacemaking.
     
      "While I was in law school at the University of Virginia, I studied law during the week and went to church on the weekend, but I saw very little connection between those two parts of my life," says Cochran. "I found that rather schizophrenic existence to be very unsatisfying.
     
      "I founded the institute," he adds, "because I believe the tensions [between law and religion] are an important and interesting subject for study and because I think the legal profession would benefit from some of the moral influences that might come from such study."
     
      But it's more than just an academic exercise. Together with Fordham University School of Law's Institute on Religion, Law & Lawyer's Work, the Pepperdine program is part of what some observers are now calling the "religious lawyering movement."
     
      "We define it as a movement," explains Fordham professor Russell Pearce, "because we have a coherent group of lawyers throughout the United States" promoting dialogue on the issue of whether lawyers can live integrated lives of faith in the context of legal practice.
     
      One thing that you'll find missing in this movement, though, is a political agenda, both Pearce and Cochran insist. And no more emphasis is placed on one religion over another. (Cochran is an evangelical Christian, and Pearce is Jewish.) Religious groups will disagree with each other, says Cochran, but when it comes to lawyering, they'll all see eye to eye on certain things-such as the deleterious effects of the adversarial system, the egregious lack of representation for the poor, and the overemphasis on big monetary awards.
     
      Doug Ammar, a featured speaker at Pepperdine's 2005 social justice conference, puts many of the ideals behind the religious lawyering movement into practice in his work as executive director of the Georgia Justice Project. Based in Atlanta, the project not only provides legal representation to the poor but also sees to it that its clients get drug and alcohol counseling, vocational training, and housing referrals, depending on the particular facts of the case.
     
      Meanwhile, on a smaller scale, certified family law specialist Ron Supancic, also a Pepperdine conference speaker, credits the religious lawyering movement with dramatically changing the way he practices. "I used to be known as the raging bull of Van Nuys," he says. But now he's a proponent of what's called "collaborative law"-a rapidly expanding branch of domestic practice in California that gives primacy to settlements and fairness for both parties, more in accordance with the Golden Rule.
     
      As with any new movement, though, questions and criticisms abound. Not the least of these is whether the movement's efforts are at odds with the hard-fought goal of preserving the secular basis of the law and the values of equality, civil liberties, and democracy. Cochran sees no inherent conflict. "I would argue that we need to look to our religious beliefs to protect these legal and political values. The concepts of equality, civil liberty, and democracy grew in the soil of religious faith. Religion at best teaches us to love our neighbors as ourselves. If we don't live by that ethic, our tendency is to use law as a tool to control and take advantage of other people."
     

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