What Makes a Lawyer Good? | Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P.

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 15 January 2021

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given to the St. Thomas More Society of Richmond Virginia on October 17, 2020.

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About the speaker:

Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P., is the Director of the Thomistic Institute and Assistant Professor in Dogmatic Theology at the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, a Ph.L. from the School of Philosophy of the Catholic University of America, and a doctorate in Sacred Theology from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. He entered the Order of Preachers in 2001, after having practiced constitutional law for several years as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice. He has also taught at The Catholic University of America Law School and at Providence College. He is the author of The Trinitarian Christology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute.
0:03.0	For more talks like this, visit us at tamisticinstitute.org.
0:11.0	Thank you, Kevin, for that very warm introduction, and it's really a privilege to be here.
0:16.0	Bishop Nestout, it's a privilege to be with you in your cathedral and to be able to be with the St. Thomas
0:21.6	Moore Society. What makes a lawyer good? What makes a good lawyer? Maybe we should start with the
0:32.1	question, what is a lawyer? There are perhaps many answers to this question.
0:39.3	St. Thomas More's sardonic description from his work, Utopia,
0:46.3	was a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters.
0:53.3	Moore, of course, being a lawyer himself,
0:56.0	perhaps knew what he was talking about,
0:58.0	but if we would try to answer more seriously,
1:01.0	we could say,
1:02.0	a lawyer is a faithful servant of a client,
1:06.0	or perhaps a skilled negotiator,
1:09.0	or an eloquent advocate,
1:11.6	sometimes a wealthy power broker.
1:15.6	Now, these are all reasons that perhaps one might want to be a lawyer.
1:21.6	But are these answers sufficient?
1:25.6	So if you are a lawyer, seated here in this cathedral or watching from home,
1:32.7	when you reach the end of your life, will you be proud to say, I was a power broker? I was
1:42.6	wealthy. I worked for an important firm. This is the meaning of my life.
1:50.5	Or are you, in fact, made for something more? Should a lawyer be something more?
	...

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