Nights of Love, Days of War

But for the grim fact of their inadequacy, I would totally enjoy my shifts as an evening advice lawyer. Every few weeks, I grab my bike and trundle off to a community centre– maybe North Hamilton, maybe St. Matthew’s – to spend a couple of hours in a borrowed office surveying the various legal difficulties people in this town endure. Everyone, from a kid sweating over a shoplifting charge to a renter steamed about meat spoiled by an unjust power cut, is welcome to attend one of these free, fast-paced meetings with a local lawyer, who’s expected to perceive, process, and proffer some shred of appropriate advice. All in about fifteen minutes. Maybe I need a newer Pentium chip installed in my brain, but it does seem a bit of a stretch to expect much true benefit to accrue from such off-the-cuff encounters, particularly since Legal Aid has a policy that prohibits us from providing any follow-up. Nevertheless, I find myself strangely loving these frantic nights spent hopping from contract to estate to matrimonial law and back again. I love the random glimpses into the aches and yearnings in people’s lives, and the chance (even if slight) to suggest how best to smooth out a sticky mess. I love the intellectual challenge of applying arcane law, those musty principles forged centuries ago by men in powdered wigs, to the blood-and-guts dilemmas of North End immigrants and laid-up steelworkers. Mostly I love the informality of it all, the fact that I can walk in there wearing old shorts and a shy grin to fend off the “you’re the lawyer? You look like a baby!” comments that are so frequently chucked my way. Evenings at the legal advice clinic may not be great for developing ongoing relationships or discerning enduring solutions, but they do offer a brief opening for people with legal problems and people with legal expertise to meet on a similar plane to compare notes, as it were, on our experiences of how law interacts with real life. Heck, give us more time and we might actually start to make some useful connections.

A wholly different reality prevails in the daytime, however. Once someone’s problem is appropriated by the legal/court system, lamentably often the needs and perspectives of the people closest to the matter are subordinated to those of the structures designed to resolve it. Simply put, process tends to overpower problem-solving. Spend a day in the criminal courts and you’ll see what I mean. Guys (mostly guys) in business suits lug stuffed briefcases across seven floors, shepherding paper in and out of rooms wherein they bow and bluster and more often than not adjourn cases to another day, while their clients follow mutely or wait for answers in basement cells. It’s not a very satisfying situation, and the worst part is, it isn’t really anyone’s fault. Order and efficiency are the golden means of any bureaucratic system, but the version they create doesn’t altogether cohere with the hopes of the humans they’re supposed to serve. A structure may be ‘working’ (that is, maintaining its self-imposed authority and achieving standards of statistical acceptability) yet still be failing its fundamental mandate of justifying, on a day-to-day basis, the resources and relevance our society gives it. This is excruciatingly evident in the legal context, where weighty, intimate concepts such as justice, fairness, and human dignity slam up against systemic and corporate considerations like profit and through-put. I might, as a compassionate fellow traveller, wish to be able to sit down with each client and help resolve the sources of their discontent with a minimum of wasted time or excess decorum, but as a professional and servant of the court, I know that I’m also expected to play quite a different game. Short (or perhaps alongside) of re-imagining the system itself, the question I face as a heart-centred lawyer is how best to reconcile these divergent forces, which often threaten to distort and tug asunder the truths and opportunities conflict can present. It’s something to spend a career working on. Happily though, I’m realising that the official apparatus of court processes and procedural shenanigans is only part of the story each legal problem tells, albeit one told in an especially loud, frightening, or foreign voice. If I can possibly stretch and deepen those few evening minutes I have with someone around a table in a community centre, so as to accommodate more of what we have to communicate with each other, then the inevitable next-day forays through the halls of the system might not be so taxing, for either of us.