To love the law is to love the past. Even for those who were inclined to fall asleep in history class, the preparation of a thorough brief requires detailed understanding of disputes long forgotten and authorities otherwise obscure. In a courtroom, the past isn’t dead. As William Faulkner said in a different context, “it’s not even past.”

On September 16, Insight Labs partnered with Generation Generosity, Akina, and a roomful of estimable esquires to re-imagine the legal profession. In advance of the Lab, Content Director Andrew Benedict-Nelson asked each participant – whether trained in the law or not – to identify a person that he or she considered to be the paragon of all that is good about lawyers and lawyering. Here’s what Jeff Leitner, Dean of Insight Labs, had to say. Click here to see the rest of the interviews.

Andrew Benedict-Nelson: Think of a lawyer who, for you, embodies what is best about the legal profession. That can be somebody from the past or from now. It can be a fictional character or real person — anyone who fits the definition of lawyer.

Jeff Leitner: For me, it’s a guy named Wallace Mendelson. I took a constitutional law class as an undergraduate and he was the professor. He was a cantankerous man in the mold of the John Houseman character in The Paper Chase. He treated certainly undergraduate students and, I suspect, students in the law school, not only as if they were unmolded clay, but as if they were somehow at fault for that.

ABN: So what qualities made him a symbol for what’s good about the practice of law?

JL: I’m the son of a lawyer and had been around lawsuits and lawyers for most of my life. But I had never seen his kind of regard for the law, almost as if he were part of a sacred trust. I can only imagine it is like being around monks who are charged with protecting sacred scrolls. He wanted us to understand how important the conversation we were having in constitutional law class was, as well as the conversations that Cardozo and other Supreme Court justices were having. I don’t think I had realized, until that point, the majesty of the law.

ABN: Now I’d like you think of the contemporary ecosystem of legal practice, from the way law school works to the various arenas where the law is practiced to the various definitions of success current among lawyers. Do you think there is a place in that world for Wallace Mendelson?It’s as if the security guard protecting the Constitution came to believe everyone was there to see him.

JL: This may be an over-romanticization, but I see him as the boy with his finger in the dike. I believe that he would not have given up the fight, that he would have said, “Look everybody, as lawyers we are focused on the wrong thing. We need to be focused on what the meaning of the law is. We have been trusted by the public to interpret that meaning and we must take that responsibility seriously.” I could see him fighting against what must be a torrent of pressure all the time. I’m not a practicing lawyer so I can’t be sure, but I can’t imagine that the kinds of lessons he taught would come up every day in the practice of law. But I have to believe that he would have fought the good fight.

Now what’s interesting is to ask if he were 21 today and coming out of undergrad, would he have gone to law school? Knowing how he felt about the law I have to say that I hope so, but I am not terribly optimistic, because it may be an overwhelming fight.

ABN: What kind of changes could we make in the practice of law that would re-orient people toward meaning in the way you’re talking about?

JL: Mendelson was a scholar of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. When he spoke of Frankfurter in the classroom, he would well up. I believe it was great regard for the man, but it was also regard for the awesomeness of the responsibility. I was thinking about what has changed. I think that the law used to be what was valued, but somehow that value got transferred to the lawyer. Somehow the security guard has become more valuable than that with which he was charged with protecting. It’s as if, over time, the security guard protecting the original copy of the Constitution at the National Archives came to believe that everybody was there to see him.

ABN: What continuities, if any, do you see between Mendelson and today’s world of legal practice?

JL: What I think may still be true is that our best and our brightest seriously consider law as a path. I believe they still consider, if only briefly, that this is a way that they could make an impact in our world. But I can see a world in which the people who want a long line of admirers winding down the National Mall are the only people who apply to law school.