(Published in the American Bar Association Journal, October 1997)

A Civics Lesson from Justice Brennan

by Stephanie Hope Accongio Dray

After three years of law school, the trauma of the bar exam, and student loan payments higher than most people pay in rent each month, you tend to forget why it is that you went to law school or ever wanted to be a lawyer in the first place. This is especially the case when you turn on the television and the latest commercial for a show about lawyers features footage of hungry sharks in a feeding frenzy.

Today, I looked over a slightly dusty letter carefully tucked away in a file almost a decade old, and I remembered why I went to law school. The warm, fuzzy truth is that I went to law school because of Justice William J. Brennan Jr. I don't many people that because it isn't a very original reason to go to law school. Justice Brennan inspired generations of law students, President Clinton among them. I'm just a nobody in that regard; I'm one of the masses.

The dusty letter that refreshed my memory was a short note from Justice Brennan to me. It was, no doubt, a routine piece of correspondence prepared by his secretary. And yet, that a man of his importance would take the time to give a gracious response to some kid with the chutzpa to think he'd read her play about the Supreme Court says a lot about the man. It was a small thing to him; probably a quick signature on an unread piece of paper as he left his office for lunch. But it meant the world to me. He treated me as if I were a somebody.

In 1988, the Supreme Court decided the case of Hazelwood vs. Kuhlmeier. In that case, a school principal censored two pages of the school newspaper. The students sued in federal court, but ultimately lost. I was a high school student at the time, and an editor on my own school newspaper. I wrote an infuriated editorial about the Hazelwood decision that ended up winning Best Editorial from the American Scholastic Press Association. That might have led me into journalism school, but I'd gained an understanding of how pervasive the law and the Supreme Court is in our lives even though most Americans would be hard pressed to name even one sitting Justice. I knew I wanted to be a lawyer.

More than anything else, I was struck by the words of Justice Brennan, writing for the dissent in Hazelwood. He wrote, in chastising the principal who censored the articles, "Such unthinking contempt for individual rights is intolerable from any state official. It is particularly insidious from one to whom the public entrusts the task of inculcating in its youth an appreciation for the cherished democratic liberties that our Constitution guarantees." And then he went on to talk about what the result meant for the students, saying essentially that students should be taught that the Constitution is a living document meant to apply to them too, not simply an old piece of preserved parchment. He wrote, "The young men and women of Hazelwood East expected a civics lesson, but not the one the Court teaches them today."

As he did in so many other cases in his lifetime, Justice Brennan recognized what legal decisions might mean to people's lives. He pushed past the dry legal analysis to what those kids would take away from the experience. By doing so, he took some high school students who had been stripped of their opportunity to express themselves in a school newspaper and told them that despite their treatment by the school and by the Supreme Court itself, they did have rights and responsibilities. He sent them the message that they were somebodies; they mattered.

In the Hazelwood case it was students Justice Brennan recognized, but as I was to learn later on, he was also a champion of African-Americans, voters, women, prisoners, the poor, the condemned, and the otherwise downtrodden. Justice Brennan was more than a jurist. He was also a teacher. His writings stressed a simple but powerful lesson -- the Constitution is emphatically not merely a document for old, rich, white men who died long ago. The Constitution is the one thing that all Americans have in common, and together, we share its joyous freedoms, its strong protections and its heavy burdens. He taught that in America, we are all somebodies.

I've decided that I'm going to take that dusty old letter from Justice Brennan and put it up on my wall. I think it will keep me from forgetting a lot of important things. After all, we who were inspired by Justice Brennan owe it to him to remember, every day, why it was that we became lawyers in the first place.