Related articles and links |  1 of 4

Bob Cochran came to faith in the early 1970s as a first-year law student at the University of Virginia. His life transformed, the son of a Baptist preacher contemplated leaving law school to go to seminary. At that time, he could imagine no way to express his newfound faith as a lawyer.

Fortunately, Tom Shaffer, a Notre Dame professor who would later write On Being a Christian and a Lawyer, came to Virginia as a visiting professor. A seminar on law and religion met at his home, opening in prayer (Cochran imagined university founder Thomas Jefferson's distress), and ending with beer. Says Cochran: "It was an eye opener." Cochran began to understand how his legal career could be a Christian vocation—an understanding he has spent most of his career developing and passing on to others.

During 25 years teaching at Pepperdine Law School, Cochran has nurtured a growing body of lawyers who believe "Christian lawyer" is no oxymoron. Cochran enthusiastically leads the national Law Professors' Christian Fellowship, writes and edits a growing body of literature on law and religion, directs Pepperdine's Nootbaar Institute on Law, Religion, and Ethics (which he founded), and leads a Bible study for law students in his home. The efforts are bearing fruit, at Pepperdine and elsewhere. "Pepperdine has always had a strong Christian emphasis," he says, but in recent years "there's been more thinking about the implications of being a Christian on being a lawyer and on the law."

Until the 1970s, many Americans assumed that they shared a Christian culture, and nowhere was that attitude more pervasive or complacent than in law. Whether in church-related schools or not, law students studied the same basic elements of law set down by Harvard Law in the 1870s: property, contracts, criminal law, civil procedure, evidence, and torts. There was no distinctively Christian way to consider these; people assumed the law was fundamentally compatible with Christian thinking.

Roe v. Wade trashed that assumption, launching culture wars and struggles over religious liberty. Groups like the American Center for Law and Justice sprang up in response, going to court in defense of Christian causes. Gradually, Christian lawyers expanded their thinking beyond controversial court cases. They began to wonder what had become of their profession.

Shark, hired gun, ambulance chaser, and most of all, casuist: harsh images cling to the profession like leeches. So do derogatory jokes. "Every time I hear a lawyer speak to a group of fellow believers," a pastor told Michael Schutt, author of Redeeming Law, "he apologizes for being a lawyer."

Sam Casey, executive director of the Christian Legal Society (cls), says he was typical when he started law school at the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution, in the '60s: "I wanted to make it in America." Law offered money, influence, and a membership at the country club. If some entered law school with higher ideals, the intensely competitive grind tended to wear them down. It seemed that success in the law could be measured in billable hours.

Today, Casey sees a "big change in the type of law students. They are coming to law school with a serious faith." Such students form the core of cls chapters at many law schools; they also feed distinctively Christian law schools.

Despite its reputation, law is peculiarly susceptible to Christian thinking. It's not like mathematics, in which religion plays no role; and it's not like psychology, where Christian thinking has always been in tension with other views. "Fundamentally, law in the West is a Judeo-Christian tradition," notes Casey. "Faith-based education is not a novelty, but a renewal."

next page... |  1 of 4

August 2008, Vol. 52, No. 8