This is original text of my chapter, Beyond a Reasonable Order, which was printed in the Larry King book, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.

by Daniel B. Spitzer

To this child of the late 1950s and 1960s in the United States, it was clear, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the world was a well-ordered place.

I suppose that politics, economics and science all lent themselves to that gauzy sense of security. The United States was the greatest country in the world, a fact my father, a veteran of the Pacific Theater in World War II, constantly impressed upon us. Hitler and his minions were dead. Our leaders seemed trustworthy, even heroic - the commanding Eisenhower, the professorial Stevenson, the energetic young Kennedy. Even our enemies seemed predictable, with the world evenly stacked between our friends, and those other, darkened souls beyond the Iron Curtain of Communism. The economy was expanding, rapidly, and there were jobs and opportunities to be had. We believed that all problems could be resolved with enough work, enough research, enough understanding.

Many of my generation have written about the crystallizing impact of the Kennedy assassination. AWhere were you when . . . ?@ was a question posed thousands of times, an emblem of our bonding as a generation and as a nation. To me, however, the more formative moment came 11 years later, with the resignation of Richard Nixon. Can you imagine anything more frightening than that moment, when these noisy adolescents, who had turned ATricky Dick@ into the symbol of everything wrong, everything they hated, about America, were actually proven right? Even more vividly than the Kennedy assassination, I recall the Nixon resignation speech, the sour, sickening feeling that our world had now truly begun the descent into chaos and disorder. The veneer of a well-ordered world had been entirely stripped away and I, for one, felt no joy at Nixon=s humiliation.

My choice of law as a profession came late, after seven years of a Ph.D. program in Comparative Literature. Law was immediately refreshing. For years, I had toiled endlessly with literary texts, constructing, dissecting, deconstructing, and had written voluminous, very bad critical studies. In law, my words had a concrete reality which I had never experienced before. It seemed like the highest form of imitatio dei: speaking words, and having them spring into being, creating order where chaos had reigned before. A client=s rambling story was distilled into charging allegations; causes of action were researched, complaints were drafted, litigation and change ensued. An idea became a contract and gave rise to a new business. A loan agreement took material form as a new building was erected. I was enthralled.

The nagging sense of chaos, however, remained. My first day on the job as a new lawyer, fresh out of law school, still awaiting bar results, the managing partner of my first firm met with all of the new hires. He told us five words to guide ourselves in the practice of law: AAssume nothing. Trust no one.@

That moment marked the beginning of my professional law practice. It also haled my dawning recognition that chaos, not order, would more often than not be the leitmotif of my practice.

For what brought me into law was a love of order and predictability, the sense that one can, through study and perseverance, arrive at clarity and truth and the right result. Moses the lawgiver had given tablets of truth, and it was for us to discern their true meaning; the Founding Fathers, likewise, had given us a Constitution to interpret, so as to discover their truth. Yes, the representation of a client is the lawyer=s immediate task, but the higher purpose is supposed to be a search for truth.

Isn=t it?

I could not have been more wrong, at least in practice. Order is illusion. Predictability is a function of politics and spin and the color of one=s tie. Truth, I was about to learn, is flexible, the lessons of Rashomon brought into the courtroom.

During my first year of practice, one of the firm=s senior partners outside my practice group took me under his wing. In retrospect, I think he was more in need of a drinking partner than impressed with my intellect or wide-eyed enthusiasm for the practice of law. For my part, I was content to drink his wisdom, along with whatever else he was buying.

One night, I shared my frustration at a particularly difficult deposition in which our client=s testimony had contradicted the essential details of a transaction, as she had painstakingly related them to us for months previously.

He turned to me and smiled. AEverybody lies,@ he said. AIt=s the one fundamental principle you can rely on. Everybody lies.@

Assume nothing; trust no one. Everybody lies.

And without a doubt, these verities have stood me well in my law practice. By assuming nothing, I have learned to anticipate, and not to fear, the unexpected. By trusting no one, even myself, I have learned to discount the statements made to me by everyone, knowing that for the purpose of practicing law, the only Atruth@ which matters is the final determination by a judge or jury. I have learned that there is nothing intrinsically predictable or orderly about the practice of law. I have learned that our legal system depends for fairness and justice upon the goodwill of jurists and common citizens, and not on some innate attribute.

This all sounds very dark and somber. To the contrary: I do not find myself becoming more cynical and detached. I have simply come to understand that the skills of a lawyer are neutral tools which may be used well, for good or not, depending upon the proclivities of the practitioner. The moral lessons I attempt to impart to my own children derive more from the mythos of the law - due process, equal justice for all, and that vaunted sense of order and predictability - than from its reality.

I am still passionate about that sense of order, and I still suffer outrage when a particularly galling result occurs. More and more, however, I am impressed with the organicism of the law. Even when a jury returns the wrong result, or a judge decides a question of law against me, I recognize that there is a process - perhaps not entirely to my liking - in the making. In this chaos, a sense of order still manages to bubble up to the surface.

2006 Daniel B. Spitzer