The Cultural Lives of Cause Lawyers.

(14.) Ibid. at 68.

(23.) Ibid.

Former Dean of Law at the University of Western Ontario

How can we understand the cultural life of any group? Where in

culture do we find such life? The answer lies partly in the query,
What is actively "living" in the nominal repository of "life," and
how do representations of that living cohere with or distend from
the "lived"?... The media, as a series of vessels, assist in
perpetuating the ways in which representative notions and images
"live" as they are distributed daily. To some degree the cultural
life of any group must exist in an eternally suspicious mimetic
relation to its members. (23)

(27.) Ben Fleury-Steiner & Aaron Fichtelberg, "Paulina

Escobar as Cause Lawyer: 'Litigating' Human Rights in the
Shadows of Death and the Maiden "in Sarat & Scheingold,
Cultural Lives, supra note 1 at 278.

The final part of the book has three essays devoted to the theme of
how the cultural work of cause lawyers and their representation in
newspapers, television, and film are received and consumed. In perhaps
the book's best essay, (29) Leslie J. Moran, of the School of Law
at Birkbeck College, explores the character of Rumpole of the Bailey "as a morally committed
politically engaged lawyer...." (30)
Rumpole is the fictional English barrister specializing in criminal law,
created by John Mortimer and made famous in books and a television
series. Moran writes that Rumpole is depicted as "a complex
character, a combination of potentially alienating cynicism and a lawyer

driven by the demand to make money and also a dedication to social

justice. He is charming and ebullient and profoundly alienating and
alienated." (31) Then, Stuart Scheingold, one of the
collection's editors, writes about Jonathan Harr's book A
Civil Action, and the film that was made of it, starring John Travolta.
(32) Scheingold's objective "is to determine the extent to
which the window Harr opens onto this segment of the cause lawyering bar
and its class action tactics stays open as his modestly marketable and
utterly convincing non-fiction book is repackaged as a popular film ...
and then remarketed as a paperback best seller."33
Scheingold's conclusion is that the media, including reviewers of
both the book and the film, end up obscuring Harr's findings and
inverting their meaning. Along the way Scheingold makes some interesting
observations about why a narcissistic personality may be intrinsic to
politically meaningful cause lawyering. The book concludes with an essay
exploring the image that low-income people have of cause lawyers. (34)

(32.) Stuart A. Scheingold, "Now You See It, Now You

Don't: Cause Lawyering, Popular Culture, and A Civil Action"
in Sarat & Scheingold, Cultural Lives, supra note 1 at 331.

What on earth does this mean? The obscurity is a pity, because

Karno is writing about the interesting case of Ed Fagan, a New York
lawyer who actively sought reparations for holocaust and apartheid
victims, and others who suffered from atrocity or wrongdoing, while
being involved in a variety of personal financial and sexual scandals.

The intriguing question, largely obscured by the Karno essay, is whether

Fagan's personal life is relevant to news about his public career.
Or, as Karno puts it, "is Ed Fagan a cause lawyer if his wide and
varied actions do not support a unified intention toward a moral
imperative?" (24)

[I]f lawyers (and the law) have gone, like Confederate troops,
"missing in action" from what might be called the enonce--that is,
the diegetic content or story-line--of Gone With the Wind, then
this lack is more than compensated for, indeed overcompensated, by
the pervasive presence of lawyering with regard to its enunciation:
that is, its narrative form, its text qua text. (9)
(1.) Austin Sarat & Stuart Scheingold, eds., The Cultural Lives
of Cause Lawyers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008) [Sarat
& Scheingold, Cultural Lives].

(34.) Corey S. Shdaimah, "Not What They Expected: Legal

Services Lawyers in the Eyes of Legal Services Clients" in Sarat
& Scheingold, Cultural Lives, supra note 1 at 359.

The Cultural Lives of Cause Lawyers is marred by unevenness in the

quality of its essays, diffusiveness in the themes they address (despite
a valiant attempt by the editors to herd the essays into three parts),
and a predilection for academic jargon. Nonetheless, it contains much
that is interesting and provocative. Implicit throughout is the question

whether cause lawyering is more deserving of praise and respect than the
gun for hire model. This question is not answered directly, but the bias
of the book is clear: cause lawyers are morally superior to the other
kind. Maybe they are, but there might still be something to be said for
the lawyer who takes on a case (rather than a cause) that he or she
finds repugnant, even if it's done just for money. Doesn't out
system of justice depend on that happening?

The Cultural Lives of Cause Lawyers

(7.) Ibid. at 5.

Philip Slayton

(16.) Ibid. at 81.

(30.) Ibid. at 298.

(26.) Stephen Meili, "'Of course he just stood there;

he's the law': Two Depictions of Cause Lawyers in Post-
Authoritarian Chile" in Sarat & Scheingold, Cultural Lives.
supra note 1 at 253.

(22.) Valerie arno, Ed Fagan and the Ethics of Causes: Who Stole
Identity Politics?" in Sarat & Scheingold, Cultural Lives,
supra note 1 at 172.

(4.) Ibid. at 19.

(33.) Ibid.

(13.) Ibid. at 77.

(21.) Ibid. at 153.

(25.) Michael McCann & William Haltom, "Nothing to Believe

In--Lawyers in Contemporary Films About Public Interest Litigation"
in Sarat & Scheingold, Cultural Lives, supra note I at 230.

(12.) Ibid. at 63.

Cause lawyering offers the legal profession an intriguing and

important paradox. Sarat and Scheingold declare in their introduction,
"cause lawyers threaten the profession by destabilizing the
dominant understanding of lawyering as properly wedded to moral
neutrality and technical competence." (5) These advocates "put
at risk the political immunity of the legal profession and the legal
process." (6) On the other hand, the legal profession needs cause
lawyers, because "by reconnecting lawyering with morality, cause
lawyers make tangible the idea that lawyering is a 'public
profession' and that its contribution to society goes beyond the
aggregation, assembling, and deployment of technical skills." (7)

In the second essay (11) of the book's first section, Kevin R.

den Dulk examines the evangelical cause lawyer as a "culture
warrior" who does not restrict his or her advocacy to the legal
arena or the "politics of rights."

Author of Lawyers Gone Bad: Money, Sex and Madness in Canada's

Legal Profession

by Austin Sarat and Stuart Scheingold, eds.

(29.) Leslie J. Moran, "Cattle Lawyering 'English

Style': Reading Rumpole of the Bailey" in Sarat &
Scheingold, Cultural Lives, supra note l at 297.

MacNeil asks whether a later can "represent the text as

cultural product ..." (10) without representing the cause the book
espouses, that of the Confederacy. He doubts that this is possible. Why
does any of it matter?

(3.) Ibid. at 11.

It's hardly news that a lot of people have a low opinion of

lawyers. There are many reasons. One is that lawyers are widely seen as
guns for hire, without commitment to society's values, or indeed to
any values at all. Members of the profession often promote the gun for
hire idea, believing that legal representation for everyone is a noble

cause, no matter who the client and what the issue.

(15.) Tim Howard, "Cause Lawyers and Cracker Culture at the

Constructive Edge: A 'Band of Brothers' Defeats Big
Tobacco" in Sarat & Scheingold, Cultural Lives. supra note 1 at
79.

New York, Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. 400

(31.) Ibid. at 312.

(9.) Ibid. at 30.

But what about the "cause lawyer," the moral activist who
tries, in his or her legal life, to promote specific social, economic or
political goals to which he or she is personally committed? (You are not
a cause lawyer unless you are motivated by personal commitment.) The
Cultural Lives of Cause Lawyers, (1) a collection of essays edited by
Austin Sarat, a lawyer and political scientist at Amherst College in
Massachusetts, and Stuart Scheingold, a political scientist at the
University of Washington, examines this phenomenon. The book is loosely
organized into three sections. The first, "The Cultural Work of
Cause Lawyers," examines "cause lawyers' production and
defense of cultural products." (2) The second section, "The
Cultural Construction of Lawyers and Their Causes, analyzes the way
popular culture understands 'causes' and the sorts of legal

motivations that qualify people as 'cause lawyers.'" (3)

The third, "The Cultural Reception of Lawyers and Their
Causes," investigates "how the cultural work of cause lawyers
and their representation in newspapers, television, and film are
received and consumed." (4)

(6.) Ibid.

(20.) Ibid. at 152.

Valerie Karno, a professor of English at the University of Rhode

Island, begins the next essay (22) this way:

If the primary goal of the culture warrior is the transformation of

errant worldviews--if lawyering and specific political causes are
really secondary matters--then the cause lawyer might feel
duty-bound to go wherever the battle is raging, which includes mass
media and entertainment as much as courts and other political
institutions. (12)
(11.) Kevin R. den Dulk, "Purpose-Driven Lawyers: Evangelical
Cattle Lawyering and the Culture War" in Sarat & Scheingold,
Cultural Lives, supra note 1 at 56.

(28.) Ibid. at 280.

(18.) Ibid. at 83 [footnotes omitted].

The second section of The Cultural Lives of Cause Lawyers, about

the way popular culture understands "causes" and the sorts of
legal motivations that qualify people as "cause lawyers,"
begins with an interesting and refreshingly clear account by Richard J.
Maiman of how British newspapers depict human rights lawyers. (19) Press
coverage of these lawyers increased dramatically with passage of the
Human Rights Act 1998, introducing the European Convention on Human
Rights into the law of the United Kingdom. Maiman concludes that what
each of the six newspapers he surveyed had to say about human rights
lawyers "derived much of its shape and substance from the
paper's established editorial views," (20) and particularly
from its attitude towards the style of the Blair government. So, for
example, to some newspapers the support of Tony Blair for the Human
Rights Act was nothing more than "a cynical scheme for helping
lawyers sympathetic to New Labour get rich...." (21) Conveniently,
one of these lawyers, much reviled by some newspapers, was Cherie Booth,
wife of Prime Minister Blair.

(5.) Ibid. at 2.

The final essay in the first section, (15) by Tim Howard, espouses
what the author calls "postmodern integration scholarship: a
scholastic effort that builds on legal realism's multidisciplinary
integration, and reflective practitioner education ..." (16) Howard

writes in a self-congratulatory way about his role, as one of a

"heroic 'band of brothers'... ," (17) in successful
Florida tobacco liability litigation. The heroic band worked at what
Howard calls the "constructive edge." This is "where the
forces of economics, nobility, law, culture and story collide in dynamic
real-time interface. Cause lawyers live the reality and humbly mediate
the crushing tension between the corporate and legal profession's
low road technical capitalism and high-road noble humanitarianism."
(18)

(19.) Richard J. Maiman, "'They all have different

policies, so of course they have to give different news': Images of
Human Rights Lawyers in the British Press" in Sarat &
Scheingold, Cultural Lives. supra note 1 at 141.

Other essays in the second section include a study of how lawyers

are depicted in the films Erin Brockovich and North Country, (25) an
analysis of how cause lawyers have been represented in recent Chilean
television, (26) and a discussion of Paulina Escobar, a human rights
activist who is a character (played by Sigourney Weaver) in Roman
Polanski's film Death and the Maiden, (27) "a complex morality
tale about the long slog from authoritarian rule to a democracy
characterized by equal rights and a respect for the rule of law."
(28)

(2.) Austin Sarat & Stuart Scheingold, "Bringing Cultural

Analysis to the Study of Cause Lawyers: An Introduction" in Sarat

& Scheingold, Cultural Lives, ibid, at 7.

(17.) Ibid. at 85.

(24.) Ibid. at 178.

(10.) Supra note 2 at 8.

(8.) William P. MacNeil, "'No sacrifice is too great for

the Cause!': Cause(less) Lawyering and the Legal Trials and
Tribulations of Gone With the Wind" in Sarat & Scheingold,
Cultural Lives, supra note 1 at 27.

According to Professor den Dulk, evangelical cause lawyers are also

social commentators, novelists, musicians, magazine editors and
television commentators. Their common enemy is secular humanism which,
with the help of "willing accomplices in elite institutions,"
(13) promotes the legalization of abortion, proliferation of
pornography, gay rights, and the right to die. The battle is
"cosmic in scope." (14)
Some of the essays in The Cultural Lives of Cause Lawyers are
baffling in their obscurity, and some are badly written, using
ill-considered academic language that muddles meaning. The very first
essay, by William MacNeil, is an example of both/McNeil contrasts the
absence of cause lawyers in Margaret Mitchell's famous book, Gone

With the Wind, with the "overabundance" of lawyers dedicated

to protecting the text of that book, particularly in a copyright
infringement action over a so-called sequel, Alice Randall's The
Wind Done Gone.