Public Service and the Law An Essay

By Justice George C. Hanks, Jr.

Why should you, as a member of the Bar, commit yourself to public service? The answer to this question can be found in something my father taught me as a young boy growing up in rural southwest Louisiana: “In the end, a man’s life will not be measured in terms of the physical possessions that he gathered during his life, but rather his life will be measured in terms of the impact that he made on the lives of those he left behind.” In other words, a person’s life will be measured in how he chose to live his life in the service of others. For our lives are all too short, and, when we are gone, all that will be left of our hopes, our dreams, who we were and what we wanted to accomplish during life, will be reflected in the kind of world we choose to leave behind and in the lives of those who follow us.
As a lawyer, society has bestowed on you a gift, a unique privilege to serve your fellow citizens and enrich their lives in a way that few professions can. Society has placed in you a sacred trust to protect and preserve the morals and values enshrined in the law by our forefathers and to help our fellow citizens resolve the problems in their lives that they may be powerless to resolve on their own. You are the caretakers of our society. Through public service, you can preserve the ideals of freedom and democracy for all citizens and help build entire nations like our founding fathers did and our counterparts are currently doing around the world, in places like Iraq and Central Africa. As demonstrated many times throughout our history by lawyers, such as former president John Quincy Adams in the trial of the Amistad captives and Charles Hamilton Houston in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, through public service, you can help shape the attitudes of an entire nation. You can help create families through adoptions and foster care placements. You can protect the innocent and prosecute those who wish to harm society. As leaders in the community, the morals and values you display in both your roles as lawyers and as citizens will come to reflect the morals and values of society as a whole.
The essence of your commitment to public service is simple: It is because the basic ideals of liberty, justice and equality under the law upon which this country was founded apply to each and every human being. Every person deserves the chance to live his life to its fullest potential and contribute his talents to society. This can only happen if those of us who are more fortunate give of our time and talents to provide every citizen with the means and opportunity to do so. We, as members of society, are at our best when this is achieved; for, what happens to the least fortunate of us, determines the destiny of all of us. If our lives are to truly have meaning, we must use them to pass on those values that have been given to us and inspire future generations to do the same. By taking the oath as members of the Bar, you accept the responsibility that society places on each of us to use our talents as best we can in the service of those who need it the most.
Every day your colleagues in the Bar take up this mantle of responsibility by devoting their time and energy to numerous programs sponsored by the Houston Bar Association. For example, through the Lawyers for Literacy Committee, lawyers encourage young students to read and aspire to the goal of higher education, thus avoiding the specter of multi-generational poverty and ensuring that there will always be future generations of informed citizens.
More than 20 times each year, lawyers in the Lawyers In Public Schools program (LIPS) substitute teach in local middle schools for entire school days. Through their service as role models, these lawyers provide the catalyst to inspire students to live up to their fullest potential and make meaningful contributions to our society. Through the Houston Volunteer Lawyer’s Program (HVLP) and monthly participation in the LegalLine programs, volunteers protect the integrity of our justice system by providing legal counsel to those who would be otherwise unable to afford legal representation and who may have become lost in the justice system. Through a partnership with the Harris County Medical Society, lawyers with the Interprofessional Drug Education Alliance (I.D.E.A.) protect our youth from becoming unwanted statistics in our criminal justice system by educating them about the medical and legal consequences of drug use. And through their work with the Special Olympics Committee, lawyers make the dreams of young athletes come true and make it possible for them to inspire us all with incredible feats of courage and determination.
Regardless of whether you work in a large multi-national law firm or as a solo practitioner, the opportunities for public service are limited only by your imagination. For, in your quest for public service, you follow in the footsteps of many Texas lawyers, just like you, whose names and faces you may not know, whose lives you may have never known, but whose dedication to the principles of the law and public service lives on through every member of the Bar.
You walk in the footsteps of lawyers sch as Peter Gray who, in 1847, was a 27-year-old bright, up-and-coming member of the Bar. Gray, without any expectation of payment and with great potential cost to his own life and career, represented a young, illiterate former slave from Louisiana named Emeline. As a result of Gray’s work, Emeline won back her freedom after she was captured in Harris County and declared the property of a prominent Houston landowner. Gray went on to serve as the first president of the fledgling Houston Bar Association and later as a district court judge and a justice on the Texas Supreme Court. Gray was the author of the Texas Civil Practice Act, which was the predecessor of our modern Texas Rules of Civil Procedure. Later in his career, Gray combined his offices with two colleagues, James Baker and Thomas Botts, to form the law firm of Gray, Baker & Botts, now known as Baker Botts, LLP. Every day, you probably drive down the Houston city street named after him, West Gray.
More recently, you walk in the shoes of individuals like George Parker, a lawyer at Bracewell & Guiliani LLP, who helped Ted Draper, an 81-year-old World War II Army Navaho code talker, an unsung American hero, obtain the medical benefits and recognition he deserved from a grateful nation. As a result of government-mandated secrecy, the courageous actions of Private Draper and many others of his tribe during World War II had been forgotten by our government for almost 60 years. The actions of individuals like Peter Gray and George Parker show us all that one person committed to the ideals of justice and public service can truly make a difference. You, as a member of the Bar, are their legacy.
In this day and age, when much attention is focused on the attainment of physical possessions as a sign of wealth, a commitment to public service takes courage and is not an easy thing to make. It is far easier to ignore the daily news reports of various societal problems such as crime, illiteracy among our youth, and homelessness than to be concerned about our obligations to serve. It is much easier to think to yourself, “Well, I’m sure one of our leaders or someone in the Bar is looking into this very problem right now.” It is very easy to be overwhelmed by what we see and to think, “What can I do about these problems anyway, I’m only one person? After all, I have obligations to my clients, my partners and my family.” The reason you must persevere in the pursuit of public service despite these doubts is very simple: Those citizens you see in the news suffering, homeless, stricken by misfortune – they are our clients, our partners and our family. They are us. They are who we might have been and who someday we might still become. We need look no further than the recent natural disasters of Hurricanes Rita and Katrina for confirmation of this fact.
Canadian Nellie McClung summed up the essence of the pursuit of public service best when she said, “I do not want to pull through life like a thread through the eye of a needle that has no knot. I want to leave something behind when I go; some small legacy of truth, some work that will shine in a dark place.” What has carried you here to your place as a member of the Bar, what we all share as lawyers, is our unwillingness to just “pull through life.” Through public service, you can become, in Nellie McClung’s words, “knotted threads,” and, by your conduct as lawyers, you will leave a legacy of justice and the law for all to see. At the end of the day, while your physical possessions may fade away with time, the impact that you made as a lawyer on the lives of those around you will live on forever. The spark of brilliance, the flame of public service with which you will warm us all is that “small legacy of truth” of which Nellie McClung speaks. The glow from your endeavors will help make us a society that promises that we can achieve together what we cannot achieve alone.

The Hon. George Hanks is a justice on the 1st Court of Appeals. He previously served as judge of the 157th District Court and was a shareholder in the law firm of Wickliff & Hall, P.C. Justice Hanks is a graduate of Louisiansa State University and Harvard Law School. He served as a law clerk for the Hon. Sim Lake of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.

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