By Frank J. Macchiarola
This is a slightly edited version of a commencement speech, given on May 22nd by Dr. Macchiarola, chancellor of St. Francis College, at the Western New England College School of Law, Springfield, Massachusetts.
"In the end, more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life and they lost it all—security, comfort and freedom... When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free."
These words, written by 18th Century Historian Edward Gibbon are as relevant today as they were in the Fourth Century B.C.. Indeed these words are also eerily accurate for 21st century Greece.
The desire for the easy life and the lack of sacrifice, the determination that society owes a living more than it requires obligation is at the root cause of the problem that modern Greek society faces. And the failure of Greek leaders—many of them lawyers—to lead with courage has made the situation tragic.
The fact that 25 centuries later the nations of the modern world are still facing the problems that were alive in ancient Greece attests to the fact that although the world changes a great deal it still remains much as it has always been. It shows that too many modern day leaders also lack the courage to lead with an appreciation of the consequences of their failures.
Your celebration today has to be tempered by the seriousness of what lies ahead. You have a responsibility as much to understand the past as you do to prepare for that future. You have an obligation to understand our society and its needs; you have an obligation to know what the values of democracy are and what the responsibilities of citizenship and leadership in our society mean. Make no mistake about it; the legal profession is the first profession of modern society. Lawyers form and shape the system of laws that govern us and you have to live by the principles of justice that our society requires. If you fail us, you betray the ideals of the rule of law that are necessary for the survival of a democratic society. You sow the seeds of civic despair.
Donald Kagan reminds us: "Pericles knew that any successful society must be an educational institution. However great its commitment to individual freedom and diversity, it needs a code of civic virtue and a general devotion to the common enterprise without which it cannot flourish or survive. It must transmit its understanding of good and bad and a sense of pride, admiration, and love for its institutions and values to its citizens, especially the young."
It must certainly be clear that more is required of you, for you also have an obligation to dig deep into your own hearts and minds to determine who you are and to decide what your obligations to yourselves and to others actually mean. And as the quotes from Gibbon and Kagan remind us, these obligations are timeless ones. They are not just those new to the year 2010. And the failure to heed them offers nothing more than a modern day tragedy for us and for our society.
The United States has been shaken by economic problems that have eroded much of our financial wealth and well-being. Just ask the homeowner with an underwater mortgage, the retiree who is the holder of a diminished IRA and the recently laid off factory worker. They will tell you that they have been betrayed and that many of the guilty have not been held to account. They will say that wrongdoers defend many of their actions by insisting on technical applications of the rule of law. Wrongdoers ask not to confuse law with morality, or with right doing. And while they may be technically correct, they betray the ethical and moral standards that many of us try to live by. They propose standards for us that compromise the principles that we expect of attorneys. And for lawyers, particularly newly minted lawyers, who are going into the world where jobs are difficult to find and debts have been accumulated at record levels, remaining true to one's own principles is a considerable challenge. How do you maintain your financial commitments to family and to your own beliefs when the temptations to ignore those beliefs are so great? How can you stay true to what you think you should do when all around you are signs that your standards of right doing might be more exacting than technical readings of the law suggest?
I am going to make some suggestions about what I think you must do if you want to stay faithful to the strong beliefs that are necessary for a legal career of distinction. I do so because I firmly believe that well formed ideals are the bedrock requirement of a happy life. The first of these is to remember that you cannot serve your clients when you compromise what you truly believe. If a client serves purposes that are not in the interests of our society and not consistent with your values, you are under no obligation to serve that client. You are always on a slippery slope when you represent a client who does not have an honest purpose. And the real danger of serving such a client is that you ultimately become involved in wrongdoing, as a co-conspirator.
It is also important for you to remember that the legal profession is a healing profession and that you will be faced with clients who need your help and who need that help without any reserve on your part. It means that the fiduciary duty must be paramount and that it must be alive and well in everything you do. You cannot surrender your principles and values to those shortsighted beliefs which very often tempt you. The most insidious of these is the pursuit of money. Particularly in these difficult times, so many of you may feel is it necessary in order to meet your own obligations. It is this pursuit of money which has driven so many in our profession to sacrifice the needs of their clients by ignoring their own standards of right doing in order that they might preserve their position and status in society. It results from the practice of confusing what you need with what you want. The temptation to post unnecessary billable hours, to charge clients for unnecessary research, to continue to engage in prolonged litigation conferences that are intended only to add to charges passed on to clients occurs in too many instances. You cannot allow yourself to be caught up in this type of endeavor by working for a firm that so betrays the interest of its clients. If you do it will compromise what you have learned in your studies here at Western New England College School of Law.
And it is in the present, here and now, that you have the luxury of reflecting upon who you wish to become. Today you are surrounded by those who love you, by those who have stood by you in the difficult years you have had in both college and law school. Their presence attests to the truth that nothing great or meaningful is ever achieved alone. Thus you know that you did not arrive at this graced moment without help. In short, you owe debts that can never be repaid—debts on account of love and support by many along the way. At times like this, graduates are usually asked to applaud for your loved ones. I will not ask that—I will ask for far more from you. More than you customarily give, but nowhere near enough to fully repay the debt .Remembering who they are, remembering what they have done for you and the values that they represent, remembering what it is that they expect of you is critical in determining who you want to be. For in the words of John Donne, "no man is an island entire of itself, each is a piece of the continent, a part of the whole." Seeing your loved ones here today and realizing who they are and what they have meant to you will strengthen your desire to be true to yourself. This is what their and your sacrifice really means.
