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My Hardest Battle

By William S. Bailey

There were no lawyers in my extended family, though my penchant for debating household rules sometimes led my exasperated father to exclaim, “You might as well be a lawyer and get paid for arguing, since you like to do it so much.” But my only contact with the profession itself was watching Perry Mason on TV every week, with his inevitable, heroically skilled extractions of “I did it” confessions at the very end of each episode, saving yet another innocent client from a murder rap.

College in the late 1960's was a great awakening for me. Up until then, I had viewed America and the world through the idealistic, somewhat naïve perspective of my parents. That all changed abruptly, with my growing awareness of inequality of opportunity, poverty and racism, as well as our crumbling inner cities, with their broken down justice systems. The slogan of the times, “If you aren't part of the solution, you are part of the problem,” motivated me to be a progressive force in my adult life. But doing what? For a time, it seemed easier to discard career options than to find the right one.

Gradually the law emerged as the best way for me to focus on the social good, with the potential to constructively change American life. So I took the LSAT, filled out applications and ended up moving to Chicago to attend Northwestern University Law School . This transition initially was a gritty culture shock, coming from the mellow hippie ethos of Oregon . Chicago turned out to be a livable place, but did have number of urban problems, just waiting for activist lawyers to solve – police brutality, government corruption, wrongful deprivation of liberty and assembly line justice among them. Quickly moving away from the predictable boredom of law school, I got involved in the community, determined to make a difference. But it was clear that in real life, results wouldn't happen in a half-hour like on Perry Mason. Yet, this fight for justice was a means of fulfilling what Joseph Campbell said was the highest calling of a human being:

Compassion is the awakening of the heart from bestial self-interest to humanity. . . . The best we can do is lean toward the light, toward the harmonious relationships that come from compassion with suffering, from understanding the other person.

Ultimately, though Chicago did not lack for interesting and worthy legal causes, I missed the West Coast, moving to Seattle with my wife Sylvia in 1976. After two years as a VISTA volunteer there, working with abused and troubled children, and then two more as a public defender doing the same, I was approaching burnout. Seeing a never-ending chain of basically good-hearted kids who never had a chance in life was more than I could bear.