It's time for law school grads to promise to pursue justice

It turns out the brains behind the plan to steal the 2020 presidential election using fake electors was a little-known lawyer named Kenneth Chesebro.

According to an email cited in the indictment of Donald Trump by a D.C. federal grand jury, Chesebro himself called the scheme he came up with "Kind of wild/creative." The Trump campaign would submit "fake" electoral votes to be counted by Vice President Mike Pence so that supporters could "start arguing that the 'fake' votes should be counted." Despite devising and attempting to submit this plan "to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors," Chesebro was not indicted along with Trump in the D.C. case. He was, though, indicted on a charge of seven counts in the Georgia state conspiracy case.

One thing on Chesebro's resume pops out. Like so many other engineers of recent attacks on democracy and the rule of law, he holds a Harvard or Yale law degree. (He was a member of the Harvard class of 1986.) Those two institutions are first and second in sending alumni to the Supreme Court, and eight of the nine current justices attended one or the other.

Chesebro, then, is just another addition to the rolls of graduates of those preeminent schools of legal learning who forgot or ignored anything they might have learned in the classroom about reverence for democracy and the Constitution. Here are a few prominent examples of others on that list:

- Stewart Rhodes (Yale Law, class of 2004), founder of the Oath Keepers, was convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role in leading the attempted coup of Jan. 6, 2021, that resulted in at least seven deaths.

- Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (Harvard Law, '95) played along with Chesebro's scheme - advertently or inadvertently - by pushing for an "emergency audit " of the presidential election results.

- Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (Harvard Law, '05) signed into law the Stop WOKE Act which U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker found violated the First Amendment to the Constitution. DeSantis signed another bill in 2021 criticized by the Brennan Center for Justice as "an omnibus voter suppression bill that will make it harder for Floridians to vote" and a third in 2023 deemed another instance of "voting rights in Florida ... under attack" by a chapter co-president of the League of Women Voters.

- Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (Yale Law, '74) flouted judicial ethics when he participated in cases involving the validity of the 2020 election even while his spouse advocated overturning its results, and again when he accepted gifts from rich "friends" who have an interest in court decisions.

This is not a large sample, and it would not add much to its statistical significance to add Yale Law grad Sen. Josh Hawley (who raised his fist in support of the Jan. 6 insurrection) or Harvard Law grad Sen. Tom Cotton (who deemed slavery "a necessary evil"). Still, in one of my favorite quotations from the world of fiction, James Bond's deadly enemy Goldfinger remarked, "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action." Including Chesebro, here we have seven.

Harvard and Yale Law School do a great job in making certain that their graduates do not starve after graduation. Four years out, their alumni rank in the top five of all law schools pulling down a median salary of over $200K per year. Do the alumni of the two schools, then, become addicted to the prospect of power and money? In treating an addict, the first step to solving the problem is admitting you have one. And, as seen, Harvard and Yale Law have a problem - with at least some of their alumni. They should do more, much more, to ensure their graduates are answerable to the higher cause of doing justice and supporting democracy.

For guidance, perhaps we can look to another profession whose practitioners also answer to a higher cause - medicine. For doctors, the health of patients should be paramount. Upon graduation, some medical schools have students subscribe to a modern version of the 2,500-year-old Hippocratic oath. Penn State, for example, has med school grads recite: "By all that I hold highest, I promise my patients competence, integrity, candor, personal commitment to their best interest, compassion, and absolute discretion, and confidentiality within the law." There's nothing about power or money there.

Lawyers do take an oath when they are admitted to practice. For example, in order to join the D.C. bar, a lawyer swears to "demean myself uprightly and according to law" and to "support the Constitution of the United States of America." That's not much. What if, as a first step, Harvard and Yale took the lead among law schools in requiring their graduates to take an oath to do justice? For Americans, it might look something like this:

As an attorney, I commit to pursue justice, to treat people fairly, to defend democracy, to ensure guilt is found only on the basis of sufficient evidence, to provide zealous and responsible advocacy to clients and to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

As a graduate of Harvard Law myself, I sure as heck would support it.

The next step, a critical one, would be to adjust the teaching curricula at law schools to make certain they support such an oath.

As Abraham Lincoln (no, not a Harvard or Yale Law alum) said, "The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next."

© Creators, 2023