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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2015
The latest book entry in Thomas Shaffer's ongoing conversation with us, American Lawyers & Their Communities (1991) (with Mary Shaffer) (1991), takes the practice of community as its subject. In spirit, it appeals to us as members of communities to be and to do better, and it intimates how we can and why. This review of the book has turned out to be less a review than a response to that underlying appeal.
Each of the book's three parts focusses on a different form of communal practice: the ethics honored among lawyers, the rispetto observed by Italian-Americans, and the obligations laid upon religious believers.
In the first part Tom labors manfully with “the gentleman's ethic.” This is a real ethics and not the how-to-avoid-malpractice-suits instruction that passes for ethics in those continuing legal education programs lawyers are required to attend each year. Real ethics puts the questions of who we are and where we come from. In his view, we lawyers are gentlemen with gentlemanly virtues nurtured as habits of the heart by the republican and biblical traditions. The gentleman is our culture. The gentleman gazes down upon us from the walls of our courthouses, law firms and law schools and calls us to remember and to realize our traditional values. The gentleman who has gone before, the gentleman we now are and are to become furnishes us with guidance.
1. “The point of departure for Christian ethics is not the reality of one's own self, or the reality of the world: nor is it the reality of standards and values. It is the reality of God as he reveals himself in Jesus Christ.” Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Kelly, Geffrey B. and Nelson, F. Burton, eds, Ethics, in A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer at 370, 385 (Harper/San Francisco, 1990)Google Scholar.
2. For the typology of believers as Israelites at the borders of Canaan, see p. 806.
3. See Ball, Milner S., The Word and the Law at 96–97 (U Chicago Press, 1993)Google Scholar for my own abbreviated, introductory attempt at professional ethics, undertaken explicitly under the influence of the Shafferian example.
4. Lehmann, Paul Louis, Ethics in a Christian Context at 346 (Harper & Row, 1963)Google Scholar.
5. Diligent search will yield a single portrait of a woman. A painting of an African American, talked about for years, is said to be in the works this year. All present portraits are of Euro-Americans.
6. Barth, Karl, The Christian Life 204 (Bromiley, G. trnsl. 1981)Google Scholar (Church Dogmatics IV, 4: Lecture Fragments).
Like much else, this volume of Barth was a gift from Tom, simply made and therefore unlikely to be remembered by him.