Image by Kalea Morgan

I was recently asked to speak to a group of second and third-year law students studying the intersection of law and love. Yes, you read that right: law and love. Odd bedfellows! Until you dip below the surface. Here’s what I told them.

I came to law school in 2008 straight off Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign, where I worked as a field organizer and volunteer coordinator. The campaign was exhilarating, in part because I was surrounded by bright, friendly, sleeves-rolled-up people who truly believed in the country’s promise. As it happened, most of them were lawyers. Their way of analyzing the world’s problems struck me as incisive and nuanced. They were all resolute in their desire to lift up the country. And they were working hard. All of us were.

My hours at the height of the campaign were maybe 6 am to midnight, seven days a week, with no breaks; approximately 2,000 volunteers had my cell phone number and it rang almost around the clock; I drove back and forth over the Sierra pass to Nevada, where I slept on a different couch at a different volunteer’s house in a different county every weekend; I flew to Chicago, where I slept in a basement because that’s where there was room; I opened a field office in Northern California and ate cold day-old pizza on the floor, calling voters until my voice gave out. The work was physically draining; at one point I was drinking double espressos each morning to get going and taking Xanax each night to fall asleep. I had to put my arm in a brace to protect my shoulder — it was painfully kinked from holding the phone so much.

Still, the joy! The exuberance! I’d do it all again. The heart-swelling, pumped-up satisfaction of kinship, of possibility, of solidarity was unlike anything I’ve felt before or since. I was, truly, in love. Not romantically, but actually, spatially. The desert porches on which we stood, talking to undecided voters; the strangers’ cars in which we drove through snowy city streets; the school gymnasiums in which we explained and role played the intricacies of the caucus process to first-time voters; the living room in which we huddled together, close enough to touch, holding our breath and then howling and jumping in exaltation at the end of the Iowa caucus — each of those spaces was, literally, a field of love.

Let me pause here to define love for the purpose of this conversation. I’ll tweak and borrow from bell hooks (who was borrowing from M. Scott Peck and Erich Fromm) in saying that love is the choice to extend one’s self for the purpose of caring for another. This choice to extend one’s self could be romantic, maternal, or, as in my campaign experience, about patriotism and social good. This choice can also show up in the law. Yes, memorizing latin phrases like res ipsa loquitur and malum in se, learning to apply odd and esoteric concepts like “the rule against perpetuities” — which, for the curious, holds that an interest in land must vest not later than twenty-one years after the death of some life in being at the creation of the interest — and girding yourself for the Socratic method — all of it can lead you to love. Because all of it leads to being a lawyer who, if you choose, works for justice. And as Dr. Cornell West said, “justice is what love looks like in public.”

For those of us who are lawyers, justice is what happens when we — or when enough of us in the legal field and the fields the law touches — choose to extend ourselves for the purpose of nurturing other human beings or life forms, including the planet. This requires that we continually develop our ability to see and act on opportunities for justice, i.e, our ability to love by acting on behalf of others, for their betterment, in the public domains of the criminal law system, the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, landlord and tenant disputes, labor and employment law, and so on.

It isn’t easy. For one thing, in order to be attuned to opportunities for justice (for creating love in public) we need to accept some awareness of pain, of loss, of grief. We need to be aware of the injustice — or the lack of love in public. We need to stay in touch with what bell hooks describes as our “yearning to end the lovelessness.” We need, as Bryan Stevenson says, to get and stay proximate to the pain. This is antithetical to how we’re acculturated; we’re often nudged toward avoiding discomfort, including the suffering of others. The law, of course, plays a role in this. Law is what keeps people who are incarcerated out of sight (and out of mind). This country (and other countries) used to be full of “ugly laws,” laws that literally forbade “ugly” people — often the disabled, sick, and/or poor — from being seen in public. Even legal education nudges us toward firm work and uber-wealthy clients, often successfully — about 97 percent of lawyers do this type of practice. So it takes effort, if you’re within the law, to see the suffering of others, to get closer to it, to feel it, and to allow or push yourself to embody a human response to that suffering. To be in call-and-response with it. But if we want our practice as lawyers to create justice, we have to stay cognizant of the “lovelessness” we are tending to. We have to believe in our ability to build “love in public,” on small scales and large scales, even in incredibly lean times where it becomes a question of abiding and forbearance more than anything else. Our directive is less to reconcile the “odd bedfellows” of love and law and more to them as potentially one thing, as potentially co-creating each other.

At this point, you may be skeptically raising an eyebrow. You may be thinking, rightly, that the law is rooted in ideals and practices of white dominance, male dominance, and capitalism. And you may therefore be wondering whether it is even possible to use it for liberation. You may be wondering whether a tool so drenched in the oppression of so many is fit for their liberation.

This is a good question. To be honest, I’m not sure of the answer. On the one hand, Audre Lorde was deploying her illuminating genius when she wrote that the master’s tools will never destroy the master’s house. On the other hand, doesn’t a tool change depending on who’s holding it? A right-wing politician could have a hammer in her hand, so could I — we’re going to use it to strike different things, to do different things, for different reasons, and with different results. I try to avoid letting my thoughts settle into binaries. I try to keep my thinking “both/and.” So, Lorde is right — the master’s tools won’t destroy the master’s house, at least not by themselves; but can they smash a hole in the castle walls so the rebels and dreamers can rush in? Can I use one hammer to crush another, then throw the crumbs of both into the ocean? Yes, I believe I can. Life is an all-hands-on-deck event. We work from within and from without.

I also believe what I read somewhere a long time ago: that we shouldn’t ask what the world needs, we should ask what makes each of us come alive. Because what the world ultimately needs is people who have come alive. Alive to each other’s incandescence, worth, sorrow’s, and potential, alive to our connectedness. Well, I come alive in the intellectual rigor of legal analysis, and in how it informs my nonlegal writing; that’s me, alive. I don’t come alive leading a protest in the streets; I’ll do it, but it’s not where I’m most effective. Someoneelse is coming alive there, and thank God. Because we need everything, in my view, and everyone. I want an ethos that leaves room for people to operate and bloom where they are most fruitful and where they most feel the spark of their gifts.

If I leave you with anything today, I hope it is the sense that your work in courtrooms, at negotiating tables, in legislatures, beside clients, and writing on your laptop can be — and in my view should be — a pronouncement, assertion, and feat of love. Love as the conscious choice to extend yourself — perhaps to give something up — so that someone else may flourish.

I am not an all-or-nothing person, so I don’t encourage anybody to enslave themselves to their job; and in particular, I encourage people from marginalized communities, whose very existence can sometimes feel like an act of resistance, to preserve their energy and make self-nourishment a regular practice.

Still, any of us who are privileged to be lawyers has something we can “give up” in service of others. Maybe you give up some of your time, working longer hours for a particular client; maybe you give up money, working at the public defender’s office instead of a law firm; maybe you give up your ego by lawyering from the position that you aren’t the smartest person in the room, your client is. We can dedicate ourselves, professionally, to this “giving up,” or what what you might call the repeated emptying of an overflowing cup. We can pour into others.

This kind of love lives and breathes in each of your careers, and in each of you. I believe it wants to emerge and flourish. I hope you let it.