Why is Access to Justice Important?
Article Date: Friday, October 12, 2007
Tom Lambeth addresses Summit on Civil Access to Justice. |
The Summit on Civil Access to Justice in North Carolina
Friday, Oct. 12, 2007
Opening Address of
Thomas W. Lambeth, Senior Associate and former Executive Director
Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation
An early agenda listed my remarks as “The Moral Imperative.” That is a pretty heavy load to lift.
It sounds a little like preaching and I am no preacher. I am not even a lawyer.
Yet if I were a preacher and this were my sermon for the day I would not turn for my inspiration to the scriptures - although they are an important and inspiring source for a discussion of justice and equity.
Instead I would turn to the words of a North Carolina journalist, an English explorer and a Pennsylvania founding father. I think what all of them wrote and how the years have embraced their words speaks to the purpose of your work. My understanding of that work, as a layman, is that you are determining whether we as North Carolinians and we as Americans will live up to our promise and the promises of our past.
My concern about whether we achieve that is driven by my own 300 years of North Carolina roots, by the two public servants whom I spent an important part of my years serving and by my involvement in a family philanthropy – someone else’s money I would note – which committed itself many years ago to helping the people of North Carolina improve the quality of their lives.
In that latter pursuit the Reynolds Foundation learned from its first grant forward that access to the benefits of citizenship was essential to that goal of a better life for Tar Heels and their families. I know that will continue under the leadership of Leslie Winner who has a lifetime of commitment to such values.
Now, to my eloquent trio: The journalist is the late Jonathan Daniels who decades ago wrote of North Carolina the following:
“The State, good, beautiful, varied, is a long way from perfection; but more than any other State in the old America, it is as it was in the beginning – with the same high hope in it, the same free people and the will to possess the same free chance. Other states possess the houses, the capitals, the preserved places, the restored buildings but the North Carolina continuity is of peoples, not of buildings, of the pioneer possibility of equality and comradeship in equality. That belief in that possibility is more than anything I know the mark of North Carolina.”
The English explorer is Ralph Lane who in September some four hundred twenty two years ago, in the first letter written in the English language from the New World to the old, reported the following:
“Since Sir Richard Grenville’s departure from us….we have discovered the mainland to be the goodliest land under the cope of heaven.”
And finally the words of Gouveneur Morris of Pennsylvania who was successful in taking the words in the original draft of the preamble to the United States Constitution which were “we the delegates of the sovereign states of Delaware, Georgia, etc. “ - and substituting for them, the words that are there today:
“We the people.”
Three sets of words: A belief in the pioneer possibility of equality; the goodliest land under the cope of heaven; We the people.
Now when Daniels wrote those words all North Carolinians did not share the same pioneer possibility of equality; it was a possibility deferred; and when the founders settled upon “we the people” it was clearly we - only some of the people – it was, essentially, we the white males and not all of them; and the goodliest land spoke of a geography, not a people. Yet over the years North Carolina has moved towards the expansion of those pioneer possibilities, the nation and North Carolina have come close to making we the people, all of the people; and we in North Carolina have done much to create out of that 16th century description of the land and water and climate a new notion of what we could as a state become for all of our people.
So what of this matter of ideas and equality? Of people and possibilities? We have had cause to look at them again in our greatest modern tragedy as a nation. Soon after the planes crashed into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside, people began to speculate why the planners of that monstrous crime did not select flight times that would have had the planes hit their targets when they were at their maximum human capacity.
We have learned through the 9/11 Commission that the reason the planes that day headed for their collisions without regard to what hour would find the maximum number of people in the buildings targeted was that in their evil calculations the terrorists did not care how many people were there. They saw the buildings without regard to the human equation that proved so deadly. They saw them as symbols of our democracy. They saw them as somehow essential to what made us who we are.
They made a mistake. They sought to bring down a nation by bringing down buildings, thinking that such an act would somehow destroy us. Yet, even if their worst designs had prevailed; for example, if they had hit the Capitol, the nation would not have collapsed. It is not the symbols of our nationhood, sacred as they may be to most of us, that make us what we are. It is the idea of freedom that does that. The idea was there before the buildings. It will be there if they are ever gone.
We sometimes forget that the founders of our nation were most often scholars. Jefferson, Adams, Rush, Madison, Franklin were men for whom liberty emerged as a great idea.
To give credibility to that idea of liberty; to make believable that ideal of “we the people” in the 21st century, that realization of the goodliest land must belong to all of us; it must be liberty for all, it must be a shared destiny in which both the sacrifice and the celebration belong to all of us.
And it must work in the lives of real people with real problems and real opportunities.
There is no more powerful component of that idea of liberty than the idea that within our free land justice is there for all and that it is accessible and applicable to all equally and in the same measure of impact and outcome. When we fail to realize that ideal, when we deny justice to any, when we deny the protection of the law because of wealth or power or position or class or religion or race, we diminish it for all. More than that we rend the fabric of the compact that we have made as citizens of a free land - a compact between all of us for the protection of all of us. Justice becomes less than it should be.
And in a time when there are many enemies of our democracy, we weaken our resolve in meeting those forces at home and abroad.
The law should be empowering and redeeming in a democracy. If it empowers only some, if it redeems for only some, it loses its value to all.
Judge Learned Hand once asked of his law clerk, “to whom am I responsible? No one can fire me; no one can dock my pay. Even those nine bozos in Washington, DC can’t make me decide as they wish. Everyone should be responsible to someone. To whom am I responsible.” Then he turned to the law books in his library and said. “To those books on the shelves there above us. That’s to whom I am responsible.”
It is that idea of the written law and its majesty that lifts up all of us. To deny that empowerment to any is not only a travesty, it is a travesty that is dangerous in times which demand that we stand together in a common conviction of the worth of our nation.
It is not an easy thing that you propose to do through the work of this commission. Not an easy thing to stand for justice accessible and equitable. Those of us in the Methodist church sing a hymn that calls us to show “the courage to do justice,” that commands us to “not be afraid to defend the weak because of the anger of the strong” nor “ be afraid to defend the poor because of the anger of the rich.”
My Jewish friends read in the Talmud that “justice, equal justice shalt thou pursue” and in subsequent commandments define equal justice as exactly the same justice for the immigrant as the native born requiring a civil and criminal process that gives not the slightest preference to the rich and powerful over the poor and powerless. Those who are of that ancient faith are ordered to pursue a relentless, never-ending quest for evidence that might tend to exculpate the accused.
Cicero said that the law “is the highest reason. It is implanted in Nature, which commands what ought to be done and forbids the opposite.” When we have taken from the law by denial of access or equal application, we have violated Nature, we have done damage to reason.
In North Carolina in 2007 we worry much about whether we are becoming two North Carolinas; one prospering and expanding, one declining. Today the control of our legislature rests in the hands of the representatives of 15 counties; not because of any conspiracy; just because of dramatically changing demography.
Into this dramatically changing environment we add a series of gaps: an achievement gap, an income gap, a transportation gap, a mushrooming infrastructure gap and a political power gap. Will we compound an already dangerous division with a justice gap?
We need to remember that equity in the access to justice and equity in its enforcement are not only protective of those who seek such access and who are the targets of its enforcement, it is protective of those we have charged with the responsibility of enforcement.
My own experience in law enforcement – in the military police – was brief and largely uneventful but one only has to walk once with an unholstered 45 into a darkened building with strange noises or patrol a narrow alley behind a commissary to have some sense of the awesome burden of those for whom law enforcement is a career. The law enforcer is strengthened in that role when he or she serves a community which believes that the law belongs to all of them and that it is applied in equal measure to all.
Finally, I believe the work of insuring equal access to civil justice is fundamental to our larger effort to bring the benefits of a global economy to all the people of North Carolina. In that effort, in this century we as North Carolinians and as citizens of the United States confront awesome odds. The numbers against which we compete - when we look at such nations as India and China - are staggering. Nine cities in the US with a population over one million; more than 60 in China. How can be possibly overcome such an advantage? Our best hope is just to be very smart, very strategic and integral to that is making our democracy work so that no part of our state or nation will think that the outcome is less important to them because they are less important to the rest of us. To go into such a competitive world without the support of all is to invite disaster.
The fact is that in North Carolina we are not ready for prime time. Each hour our state adds 21 people to its population. If we are to meet the needs that this tsunami of population increase represents the public investment will be as little as $19 billion; perhaps more than $60 billion. We cannot achieve that kind of public commitment with a population that is divided by inequitable access to the benefits of democracy.
So, if you do not believe in equal access to justice as a matter of common humanity; believe in it as essential to economic development.
The ABA in its mandate to the Task Force on Access to Civil Justice uses language that captures your challenge best for me. It mentions “problems that can imprison one in poverty or discrimination.” That is, of course, the reality with which you – we – must deal. That denial of access to civil justice imprisons those denied in a situation that prevents them from being all that they might be. It prevents them from contributing all that they might contribute to the common good. Yet they are not the only prisoners when such a condition prevails. All of the community in which they live is to some extent imprisoned. We are all denied the benefits that would come from a society in which equality of access and opportunity prevail.
What you are about is important work. It is consistent with the noblest traditions of your profession and with the deepest values of our democracy. In the best Tar Heel spirit, go forth and pursue justice, equal justice; do not fear to defend the weak because of the anger of the strong; do not fear to defend the poor because of the anger of the rich.
I wish you well and I thank you for letting me be a part of this summit.
Last Update: Tuesday, January 15, 2008