What Can We Learn From Monica Goodling?

By invoking her Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination in the wake of the US attorney firings, former DOJ official Monica Goodling has brought quite a bit of attention to her alma mater, Regent University Law School.  The New York Times, in reporting her recent resignation, deemed it newsworthy that Goodling attended a law school founded by Pat Robertson and a college (Messiah) which, The Times commented, describes itself as being "committed to an embracing evangelical spirit."  The Boston Globe has now profiled Regent, reporting that its graduates' employment prospects have flourished under the Bush administration and suggesting that the prospects have turned on ideology more than quality.  An excerpt:

As the dean of a lower-ranked law school that benefited from the Bush administration's hiring practices, Jeffrey Brauch of Regent made no apologies in a recent interview for training students to understand what the law is today, and also to understand how legal rules should be changed to better reflect "eternal principles of justice," from divorce laws to abortion rights.  "We anticipate that many of our graduates are going to go and be change agents in society," Brauch said.

For those of us trying to build Christian law schools, the challenge is to help form lawyers who will be agents of change in society yet still bear witness against the corrupting influence of individual and institutional power.  Putting aside questions about the substance of the "eternal principles of justice" that Regent grads might be pursuing, how do we seek to shape lawyers in order to have influence without becoming part of the problem?  I don't know Monica Goodling, but I have no doubt that she intended to do God's work when she joined DOJ.  The lasting impression she leaves to the wider world, though, is of having behaved unethically in service to a political power play.  It is more in keeping with Jerry Falwell's understanding of a Christian lawyer ("We'll be as far to the right as Harvard is to the left.") than Tom Shaffer's, who calls lawyers to look to the biblical prophets as models.  As Shaffer puts it, believers have

an odd political theology -- a political order called into being by God, which political order is subject to repeated (even perpetual) subversion, systematic subversion set up and perpetuated by God.  God's subversives are the Prophets -- disinherited from political legitimacy, protesting, pointing to a Lord who "decisively intrudes, even against seemingly impenetrable institutions and orderings." Put in place by God to make power uncomfortable, not just for tyrants but also for legitimate rulers, rulers the Lord put in place to begin with.

(15 St. Thom. L. Rev. 469)  In a marketplace where power and influence are the coveted commodities and prestige-driven rankings are king, how can an institution facilitate the formation of lawyers as prophets?