How Do Lawyers Serve Human Dignity?

At Notre Dame over the weekend, I presented a paper on the rise of secularism within the legal profession, which I see as the triumph of the technical over the transcendent.  It's evidenced in part by a move from the "moral law" approach of the 1908 Canons to today's "ethics" codes, which are primarily technical regulations.  There are some good reasons for this move, but it is by no means costless.  There are several market, regulatory, and cultural developments that have contributed to put tremendous pressure on lawyers' ability to see themselves as anything more than technically competent mouthpieces.  I'd be happy to email a draft to interested readers.

In a related paper, I take on the thin conception of human dignity that prevails within the legal profession.  This paper is now online and available for comment.  Titled How Do Lawyers Serve Human Dignity?, here's the abstract:

The conception of human dignity that prevails within the legal profession is roughly interchangeable with individual autonomy. That is, lawyers serve the cause of dignity by facilitating the client’s autonomy. In this regard, the legal profession’s dignity discourse lacks the nuance and depth that is found in the discourse occurring in other fields, bioethics in particular. As far as it goes, autonomy is a key component of individual dignity, but autonomy does not exhaust the nature or implications of dignity, particularly the narrow conception of autonomy employed widely within the legal profession. The narrowness results, in significant part, from lawyers’ failure to invest in the dialogue necessary to pursue a fully relational sense of client autonomy, rather than a simplistic autonomy of individual self-interest secured through the maximization of legal rights and privileges. In reality, there are multiple layers of human dignity, not all of which are centered on individual autonomy. Whether or not a more authentically relational conception of autonomy can be reclaimed, it is important to articulate how the human orientation toward relationship can help provide substantive content to, and draw professionally relevant implications from, the elusive concept of human dignity.