Osler's Razor

There are a lot of things I have explained on this blog, but I'm not sure I have ever gotten around to explaining some of the most important things.

I have written here about my work, but not why I choose to do that work. There is, in fact, something that ties it all together. Many of you know that I love the message in Micah 6:8-- "What does the Lord your God require of you, but to love justice and to show mercy and to walk humbly with your God." That passage informs my work in two ways-- first in how to approach it, and second in what it should be.

First, I try to keep humility as a central value in my teaching and writing. In the classroom, I never want to humiliate a student as a teaching tool. At times, especially in practice court, I lost track of this, and I deeply regret it. I may know more about the subject than my students, but they are more important than I am-- their education is about them, not me. In my scholarship, I also try to avoid intellectual arrogance and present my ideas as one among many principled arguments.

Second, much of what I teach and write about has to do with the tension between justice and mercy, if justice is treating like people alike, and mercy is giving some a break or chance for redemption. It is very hard to reconcile those two goals within a sentencing system. What my work seeks is that at least there be elements of both-- that there be both justice and mercy. The areas I have attacked (crack sentencing, juvenile life without parole, the death penalty) are those where I feel there has been no room left for mercy. At the same time, I am not comfortable with those areas where mercy completely overwhelms justice, such as the (very rare) reversal of the conviction of a clearly guilty person because of the Miranda rule.

I am imperfect in how I pursue these two sides of Micah 6:8, but it does provide a unity between my faith and my vocation that lets me continue this work even when others disapprove.