Did the Rule of Law Explode?

Yesterday domestic violence was the focus of my clinic class.  Along with several guest speakers who practice victim advocacy law,  I urged my law students to practice self-care and to anticipate vicarious traumatization in this work.  We discussed resilience, and balancing holistic lawyering with appropriate lawyer-client boundaries.  We brainstormed stress management activities ranging from running to retail therapy. 

And today I am sad.  Nearly despondent at times.  You wouldn’t notice it from my professional demeanor, but I’m aching inside.  The sky looks exactly the same today as it looked that morning thirteen years ago when the world changed.  The morning the D.C. federal courthouse where I worked was evacuated and my boss and I discussed how long we could “get away with” staying in the building to finish up some pressing work.  The morning I could not reach my boyfriend to tell him I was safe, and knew in that same moment that I would marry him and help raise his children who had lost their mom three months earlier to the day. The morning I wondered what the rule of law meant if we were abandoning a federal courthouse where we could see the Pentagon burning from our office window.

Sometimes I still wonder what the rule of law means, where it takes us as a society, how it serves us.  I hope it means we get a little better about self-governing every day.  That we continue to define societal expectations about what constitues behavior punishable by criminal sanction or enforceable by civil court order. 

Twenty years ago the United States Congress passed groundbreaking federal legislation with the Violence Against Women Act.  Life and the law under the VAWA is far from perfect.  But it’s better.  My students can lean on the state statute authorized by the VAWA to gain protective orders for their clients. Tomorrow, one of them will do that at a hearing in a small, beautiful state courthouse that on September 11, 2001 did not have to be evacuated.  There will be protective order hearings in my old courthouse in D.C. too.  We went back to work within a few days, and the rule of law proceeded.  As shall we.