Overview of The Center for Law and Renewal

The Center for Law & Renewal is a not-for-profit organization founded in 2002 by the Fetzer Institute, a private operating foundation located in Kalamazoo, Michigan. During the course of its nearly five-year history, the Center convened numerous groups of leaders in the legal profession to explore key openings for change in the field, experimented with different kinds of educational programs, focused on language that would “invite people into the conversation,” and considered various options regarding institutional structure. The Center’s leaders and advisors acknowledged that shifting the field of law and justice will involve transformation of individual law professionals, legal institutions, and the clients and communities they serve, and the Center began developing programs designed to catalyze change at all of these levels.

More recently, the Center’s board and staff engaged in a process to assess the Center’s unique institutional competence – what business is it in, and how can it best add value to the field of law and justice? The Center’s leadership, informed by a broad range of voices in the legal profession and other fields, concluded that the Center is primarily in the education business, and that its audience is the entire legal profession – not only lawyers working full-time in the public interest sector. Shifting the field toward a new vision will require the renewal of public spiritedness and courageous leadership throughout the profession, and recasting the role of the lawyer as one that is relational to the clients and communities she serves. The Center’s leadership then identified three primary portals into educational programming around these goals:

The Center subsequently reframed its mission and message, refined its programmatic focus and changed the organizational name.

The Center has developed innovative and unique programs in four areas of concentration that have been well-received nationally. Each of these areas is summarized below to provide a glimpse of the need and the products the Center has successfully launched.

Many law professionals are struggling with a crisis in values and identity. For well over a decade, legal scholars and practitioners have held conferences and published numerous articles and books about the growing dissatisfaction and decline of ethics and civility within the legal profession.^{^[1]}An overarching theme in the literature is that this scenario arises out of a conflict between lawyers’ personal values and the demands placed upon them in their professional roles. In the words of William F. May, founding director of the Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility at Southern Methodist University, the professions face an identity crisis today which conventional, case-oriented quandary ethics do not address.

Behind discrete ethical dilemmas lie the deeper questions of professional identity. Who am I? Whom shall I become?Professionals live today in the engulfing world of the marketplace and the corporation; and they prepare for their professions in the engulfing world of the university. What am I? A mix of technician plus entrepreneur? A careerist making my way in the headwinds and crosswinds of the corporation? Or something more? ^{^[2]}

May goes on to describe the “moral mark of the professional” as tracing back to the biblical concept of a vocation or calling, directed to service of human need. He states that lawyers need to transform habits (both in themselves and in their clients) so that they transcend the ruthless pursuit of personal gain. If not, the lawyer’s vocation will amount to no more than tutoring clients in the ways of using the law against other parties and the state (without taking into consideration the common good and the advancement of justice).^{^[3]}

Parker J. Palmer, renowned author and educator, reinforces May’s sentiments by calling for a “new professional” - a person who can say:

In the midst of the powerful force-field of institutional life, where so much conspires to compromise my own core values, I have found firm ground on which to stand – the ground of my own identity and integrity, the ground of my own soul – ground from which I can call myself, my colleagues, and my workplace back to our true mission.

In an effort to begin to address the challenges and opportunities identified by May, Palmer and many others, the Center has offered several Courage and Renewal in the Law retreats for lawyers and judges based on the Circles of Trust model developed by Palmer and the Center for Courage and Renewal. Using poetry and literature from a variety of wisdom traditions, these retreats combine reflection, guided inquiry and discussion to consider the intersection of vocational renewal, personal integrity, and a deepened capacity to serve clients and communities out of a relationship-centered ethic of care.

In addition to these unique and free-standing retreats, the Center is developing seminars for law students and practicing attorneys on “Ethics Beyond the Rules” based on the principles and practices of Palmer’s Circles of Trust model. The Center plans to convene teams of legal educators and administrators from various law schools at The Crossings, a retreat center near Austin, Texas the last weekend in March 2007 to experience this approach to legal education and discuss how to make it available more broadly in the academy. The Center also is planning a gathering of legal educators at the “Uncovering the Heart of Higher Education Conference” in San Francisco in February (sponsored by the Fetzer Institute and the California Institute of Integral Studies). See www.heartofeducation.org. The Center is uniquely positioned to offer these kinds of programs because, from its formation, it has worked to develop “upstream” approaches for addressing the serious challenges facing the legal profession. In so doing, it has partnered with educators from many other fields to reach law students and practicing lawyers.

All law professionals work in or with institutions – whether they are law firms, courts, government offices, public interest organizations or law schools – that experience tensions around values and identity. Legal institutions today are challenged by the increasing demands of commercialism and market forces – threatening the integrity of professionals that work within them, and compromising the pursuit of the common good for clients and communities. The Center offers leadership programs to equip law professionals with foundational principles and key leadership competencies (knowledge, tools and skills) to narrow the gap between aspirational values and institutional realities. In partnership with the University of Maryland Academy of Leadership, the Center is developing two-day Leadership, Ethics and Innovations in the Law seminars for law professionals to equip them to become powerful agents of change and communicators of a new vision for their institutions and the broader profession. Featuring Carol Pearson and Steve Denning as lead presenters, the Center will pilot this seminar in Minneapolis on February 8-9, 2007, with a target audience of lawyers working in private law firms and corporations. The Center plans to take the seminar to other major cities in 2007 and beyond, including Washington, D.C.

The Center has identified many portals for educational programming for lawyers interested in democracy-building and community renewal. None has been more pressing than that in the Gulf Coast area. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Center launched a partnership with the Mississippi Center for Justice (MCJ) to advance the role of law and justice in community renewal. Katrina exposed shocking and unthinkable poverty, racism and injustice in our nation’s poorest region, and it inspired a national conversation about the government’s failure to respond to unimaginable human suffering. Despite the glaring injustices wrought by the storm, the role of law was largely invisible in the initial stages of rebuilding in Mississippi and Louisiana. To address that void, MCJ, a statewide legal and policy advocacy organization that advances racial and economic justice, stepped in to respond to immediate, on-the-ground legal problems for Katrina survivors, and to lead law reform efforts, particularly in the areas of housing and economic security for low-income Mississippians. MCJ works extensively with regional and national law firms, law schools, non-profit organizations, and grass roots groups in its systemic change advocacy efforts. To support these efforts and develop a pilot project demonstrating the essential role of law in democracy-building and community renewal, the Center is partnering with MCJ to offer two kinds of educational programs in the region:

Lawyering and Affirmative Advocacy Training in Mississippi in collaboration with MCJ and Legal Aid University. Over 50 legal aid attorneys, policy advocates and community leaders from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, and Florida gathered to develop skills and share best practices for community-based advocacy. The agenda included training on leadership development, communications skills and effective policy advocacy to achieve better outcomes for low-income people regarding access to affordable housing, quality education, health care, child care, and juvenile justice. A key component of the training involved developing strategies for building lawyer-community leader partnerships to bring about lasting change in these five Southern states. This training event was supported by the Kellogg Foundation and the Florida Bar Foundation. The gathering was the first step to forming a larger collaborative venture that convenes legal advocates and community leaders for trainings over time to build the capacity of a Gulf Coast regional network that advances racial and economic justice. As the Center finds a new home in a law school, the leadership expects that the law school leaders will continue to back this important work in the Katrina-affected states.

The Center has partnered with the Fetzer Institute and MCJ to offer two Spirit of Justice retreats for public interest lawyers, private sector lawyers, and a broad mix of community leaders (clergy, educators, funders, non-profit leaders, and business leaders) in post-Katrina Mississippi. Based on the Fetzer Institute’s Generosity of Spirit Project and the Learning to Give curriculum (www.learningtogive.org/), these community-building retreats have enabled Mississippi leaders to begin to build trust across the lines that typically divide people (race, class, gender, age, ideology, and sector), and to identify their personal and collective gifts for healing daunting social problems. Using cross-cultural teaching stories with themes on giving and receiving, the retreats introduce the frame that “just systems liberate the hidden capital in communities, while injustice serves to oppress these resources.” The Center and the Fetzer Institute plan to continue to offer these retreats in Mississippi during the next three years, and hope to replicate this model in other regions of the country, and perhaps other parts of the world where democracies are emerging. It will be important that the Center’s new law school home support and participate in these community-building retreats.

The Center is publishing a collection of essays on Law and Renewal in three volumes:

With support from writer and documentarian Joanne Edgar, the Center also is developing a Stories Project that highlights extraordinary efforts of lawyers who have made a significant difference to clients and communities by changing their legal practices, transforming their institutions, and renewing their communities through the law. The purpose of the project is to inspire and educate other law professionals about the possibilities of living an authentic and fulfilling life as a successful law professional.

^{^[1]} See e.g. Kronman, Anthony T. The Lost Lawyer: Failing Ideals of the Legal Profession (Belknap Harvard 1993); Glendon, Mary Ann. A Nation Under Lawyers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1^st ed. 1994); Linowitz, Sol M. The Betrayed Profession: Lawyering at the End of the Twentieth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press 1994); Rhode Deborah L. In the Interests of Justice: Reforming the Legal Profession (Oxford University Press 2000); Sells, Benjamin. The Soul of the Law (Element Books 1994).

^{^[2]} May, William F. Beleaguered Rulers: the Public Obligation of the Professional (Westminster John Knox Press 2001), p. 7.