No Other Gods: Answering the Call of Faith in the Practice of Law

Abstract

I the Lord am your Godwho brought you out ofthe land of Egypt,the house of bondage:You shall have no other gods besides Me.Exodus 20: 2-3.It is one of the oldest stories around: A few or perhaps a dozen centuries ago, a person walking by a group of stone masons in a work crew at a half-finished cathedral asked each one in turn, “What are you doing?” The first replied, “I'm cutting stone.” The second said, “I'm earning the money I need to feed my family.” The third answered, “I'm building a cathedral.”If today our passerby were to make a similar inquiry of three lawyers entering a courthouse, the answers might be, from the first, “I am going to argue a case,” and from the second, “I am working—billing some time—to feed my family.” If the third happened to have been influenced by Professor Thomas L. Shaffer, however, his response might be a bit more arresting. For over the past fifteen years Shaffer has been articulating with increasing clarity his perception that a lawyer is a person “called out of the church, sent out from [a] particular people, to do something that is religiously important.”