the Zealous

In 1923, a young Boston lawyer named Archibald MacLeish, who finished first in his class at Harvard Law, was made partner at his firm. He resigned the same day to move himself and his family to Paris.

This is why.

Before Constance Baker Motley was the first Black woman to sit on the federal bench, she was the lawyer the segregationists least wanted to see walk into their courtroom.

Motley spent two decades as a front-line litigator for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where Thurgood Marshall hired her as the organization's first female attorney while she was still finishing at Columbia Law School. She was the only woman on the LDF team that wrote the briefs in Brown v. Board of Education. She then spent years turning Brown from a principle into admissions letters, courtroom by hostile courtroom.

She argued ten cases before the United States Supreme Court and won nine. That is a record most appellate specialists who do nothing else for a living never approach, and Motley compiled it while also trying cases in the trial courts of the Deep South, where the danger was not losing a motion but the drive back to the hotel.

This is the third in an occasional Zealous series exploring major legal philosophers, with the aim of demonstrating why their ideas should matter to anyone who currently practices law. The previous entry on H.L.A. Hart ended with a teaser for a true clash of titans: before Dworkin picked up the gauntlet, Hart faced an earlier challenger who insisted that law, by its very nature, embodies a morality of its own. That challenger was Lon Fuller.

Lon Luvois Fuller (1902-1978) came out of Stanford with a law degree and never stopped working both sides of the line between theory and practice. He taught contracts at Oregon, then at Duke (where a young Richard Nixon sat in his class), and in 1940 joined the Harvard Law School faculty, eventually holding the Carter Chair of Jurisprudence until he retired in 1972. But Fuller was never an isolated academic. While teaching at Harvard, he simultaneously practiced as a labor lawyer at Ropes, Gray, Best, Coolidge & Rugg in Boston, and served for years as a labor arbitrator, including a five-year stint with Bethlehem Steel. His contracts casebook drew on that experience. He knew what it felt like to sit across the table from a counterparty, to advocate for your client's position and cause with zeal and skill.

That real practice background shaped everything Fuller thought about the law. Hart and Dworkin were preoccupied with judges deciding hard cases. Fuller was preoccupied with the rest of us. He saw lawyers not just as officers of the court, but as what he called "architects of social structure": the people who design contracts, build institutions, and create the frameworks within which human beings actually cooperate. He coined a term for this work: "eunomics," the study of good order and workable social arrangements.