Lawyers as Healers- Injustices as Breaches in Our Human Community

During my visit to Washington D.C I visited the Martin Luther King Jr memorial where I stood in front of every quote, pausing, reflecting on the power of King’s divine messages of hope, love, and justice. I contemplated the following quote for a good while. 

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” (MLK Jr, Letter from Birmingham City Jail, 1963).

In his book ‘Martin Luther King Jr and the Morality of Legal Practice- Lessons in Love and Justice’ Robert K. Vischer says of the above quote (@p151-152) “He [King] did not just mean that injustice unchecked will eventually affect everyone; he was making the more radical claim that injustice anywhere harms the human community to which we all belong”. 

Somehow, somewhere along the way, we have forgotten this: that we -all of us- belong to one human family. There are instances when we get a glimpse, a reminder that the pain of one individual even a so-called stranger, causes pain in others: such as when a community suffers loss of life in a natural disaster, or in smaller communities the loss of a young person by suicide. It is in those times that our souls and hearts are stirred, and we momentarily give ourselves permission to feel past the anaesthesia of the informational bombardment that strives to desensitise us.

Yet adversarial law practice, which is premised on the promise of delivering justice, is in its own definition, separatist. Adversarial can be defined as, “involving or characterised by conflict or opposition”. Synonyms include “antagonistic, antipathetic”. How then, can such a system produce bricks of justice to build strong foundations of love for our human community? And if justice is about repairing the injustices (breaches) how does an oppositional system restore fractured relationships (those in conflict/ in legal dispute). In short, it cannot. A holistic, restorative, therapeutic, integrative, and collaborative lens and way of law practice which seeks to make amends, forgive, and heal is increasing in influence, globally. Ancient wisdom is resurfacing, and modern science is merging with core religious teachings that centre on loving thy neighbour, our interconnectedness and vibrational weave. 

Injustices then, Robert continues, are like breaches in our beloved community, and the mission to repair those breaches made King in a real sense, a healer. King’s work can be seen as a Ministry of Healing through advocating, “the expansion and enforcement of …rights as tools to help repair the breach in the human community”.

Trained as an adversarial lawyer, my lens was separatist, about ‘othering’, the ‘them and us’ narrative that guarantees entrenchment in hierarchical positions, creating inequality, discriminating, and perpetuating injustices. Through my clients’ story telling about their lives, their pain, their loss, their grief, I was gifted a spiritual transition. Instead of seeing life as a mirror in which I saw only myself, I began to see life as a window through which I saw other selves and there was born my innate understanding that what affects one in a conflict or legal dispute, affects the whole and that my identity as lawyer needed to be reframed. Reframed from righting the ‘wrongs’ in a partisan manner which hangs the ‘other’ party out to dry, to wearing the holistic goggles through which I am empowered to facilitate the healing of fractured relationships, where all are given the opportunity for restoration, support, and healing.   

King lamented our failure to “see people in their true humanness… to think of them as fellow human beings made from the same stuff as we, moulded in the same divine image”. How then, can lawyers act as agents who assist society in seeing people in their true humanness? 

In my Holistic law practice I have achieved this by shifting approach in the way in which I regard my clients (advise and manage their cases), from as King said the “…fiction of a rights-bearing individual who stands alone, without context or commitments…” to the deeper understanding that as humans, “we are orientated by our very nature to relationship”. To experience justice then, the end goal must surely be to bring healing to all relationships involved in the legal process; for lawyers to re-examine our identity from separatists to healers, harnessing our power to love and bring love to our human community.