RECONNECTING LAW'S SOURCES

RECONNECTING LAW'S SOURCES "The students who remained were receiving an education that was as philosophical as it was practical. By now they understood that their collective ambition was to become social engineers --to use the law to change the law. Edward P. Lovett, an unassuming but gifted student recalled: 'In our classes , whether it was equity or contracts or pleadings, stress was placed on what was right under the Constitution and statutes--our rights as worded and regardless of how they had been interpreted to that time. Charlie's [Charles Hamilton Houston] worldview was that we had to get the courts to change--and that we could and should no longer depend upon high powered white lawyers to represent us in that effort .' Perhaps more than any other, Lovett's description asserts the radicalism of Houston's mission at Howard. To this day, American law schools teach the law; indeed the essence of attending law school is that one learns what the law is and studies how to apply it to a multitude of hypothetical fact patterns. By doing this , students learn what it means, as every first year hears ad nauseum , to 'think like a lawyer '. "Learning the law and learning to think like a lawyer were but the elementary steps in becoming a social engineer. The third step , described by Lovett in his recollection was most critical: In order to give meaning to steps one and two --if they were to be anything but parasites on their society--African American lawyers were obligated to know what the law 'should be.' They had to know the Constitution better than the Supreme Court had allowed it to be known and trust its precepts more than the framers had themselves. Despite what settled case law mandated, the Constitution did not allow for a nation divided separately and equally by race . As surely as it forbade slavery itself, the post-Civil War Constitution forbade the discrimination that ultimately dehumanized both races. For all of his Ivy League education and conservative mien, Dean Houston's teaching law in this manner was as audacious as the arguments he and his former students soon would be presenting to courts across the country." P. 52-53, "Social Engineers," ROOT AND BRANCH: CHARLES HAMILTON HOUSTON, THURGOOD MARSHALL, AND THE STRUGGLE TO END SEGREGATION (2010) by Rawn James, Jr. In order to know what the practical law "should be," as stated above it is of course prudent, expedient, to know the source of "law" itself, its primal forerunners , its forebears . Certainly ancient Nubian-Egyptian philosophy, religion, geometry are among law's proofs and methods. Yet even these are subordinate to that animating divinity back of all that is, that was, that can ever be. This original knowledge of God, encapsulated in "Maat"-law, order, balance , harmony, beauty, as embodied in the "breath of life" has come down to us, but piecemeal, but haltingly, from Greece, through Rome, Islam, then Italian Renaissance-Western Europe, through North America. Back of all of these ideals of law is the ideal God, the real, as proven in nature, mathematics, in human existence. This then is the fourth (4) step of the Houstonian legal pedagogy: knowledge of the source of law, in spirit, truth, taught, lived, applied. Thereby, when the knowledge of the human law reconnects with its vivifying, rigorous, antecedents of divine law and love, not merely will, not merely must, all courts change, but the hearts, minds, practices of mankind too must change as well! Amen 🙏.