Supreme Court Justice speaks on humility to lawyers’ guild

Good exemplar was St. Thomas More, who was both a lawyer and a judge

OTTAWA (CCN)

Supreme Court of Canada Justice Russell Brown spoke to Christian lawyers Sept. 22 on the importance of humility to find the right balance of mercy and justice.

Speaking to the annual banquet of the Saint Thomas More Lawyers’ Guild of Ottawa, Justice Brown told the more than 100 lawyers and well-wishers he came from the Protestant background, but had admired Thomas More since, as a teenager, he had seen him portrayed in the film A Man for All Seasons.

Thomas exhibited the virtue of humility, said Justice Brown, something he discovered when a colleague sent him a novena to the saint upon his appointment to the Alberta bench, and on one of the days, the novena sought his intercession for the virtue of humility.

“Notwithstanding his earthly success, he was conscious of its power to delude, to lead him to think only of things of this world, and to obscure the fact that, like all of us, he was a sinner,” he said. “That his prayers were penitential and sustained show this.”

Justice Brown said he emphasized More’s humility because he was both a lawyer and a judge.

Humility does not require becoming a “doormat” or submitting to indignity, he said, noting most are tempted to err in the direction of too little humility than too much.

One problem judges face is the undue deference shown them, he said.

“Inside and outside of court, we are used to people deferring to us,” he said. “We are accustomed to people ceasing speech when we speak. We are used to people laughing at our jokes.”

While it is good the public trusts judges, he said, the “public often views our pronouncements as irrefutably true and indisputable rather than as the product of disputed and disputable judgment calls.”

The public also sees judge’s “statements of the law as an utter and unanswerable refutation of the validity of the losing side’s propositions of law — which is not a good thing,” he said.

It’s easy to “be seduced by all of this,” and to “become proud,” he said, and Christians can also succumb, even though we “have fewer excuses since we worship what we believe to be the only perfect example of humility.”

“Thomas knew of that perfect example of humility, and of his own inability to emulate it,” Justice Brown said. “His fear of losing faith at the last — which, to his great credit, we know now that he did not — spoke to his self-knowledge, that he was, for all his great qualities, a weak and imperfect being. That, his remarkable accomplishments as a jurist and legacy as a martyr for his faith notwithstanding, he would have acknowledged God as the only Perfect Judge.”

Justice Brown, who was appointed to Canada’s highest court in 2015 by Stephen Harper, said experience does not make judges wise, nor is it easy to find the proper balance of mercy and justice.

“Mercy and justice are characteristics that each lie on a different spectrum,” he said. “Justice lies on a mean between injustice –a complete disregard for what is just– and vengefulness — an overwrought obsession with justice,” he said “Similarly, a person who is insufficiently merciful is cruel, while one who is overly merciful will be indulgent.”

Thus either justice or mercy “can be underdone or overdone,” and the “judicial role is not only to arrive at the ideal point on each spectrum, but also to find the point of intersection between the two spectrums, the location of which will be unique to each case.”

He noted sometimes mercy and justice will conflict.

Answers can be found in the Bible, especially in chapter six of the Book of Micah, he said.

“Micah records that God issues a remarkably tender and moving injunction: ‘what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love mercy?”

“But his beautiful injunction does not end there. ‘Do justice,’ He says, and ‘love mercy”, and “walk humbly with your God.”

“And my claim is that walking humbly — adopting a standpoint of, and inculcating, humility — may be the key to unlocking the justice/mercy paradox; to striking a practically wise balance both within and between those competing virtues,” he said.