Conclusions
In this paper I have argued that humility, far from being (as is mostly defended in legal scholarship) a judicial virtue that favors restraint in the exercise of the judicial function, is a trait of character that is highly valuable for the legal professions broadly conceived.
Humility is critical for professional organizations, professional practice, and professional development in law. Its political value, moreover, is hardly restricted to it being an argument against judicial activism, but it importantly fosters democratic values in that it contributes to establishing egalitarian, cooperative, and inclusive social relations within the legal professions, enhances practices of group deliberation in law, and promotes legal professional development through social learning. Arguably, given the central role that legal professionals (especially those in public service, but also in the private law sector) play in shaping legal and political culture, the democratic effects that the cultivation of humility in law brings about extend beyond the legal profession to reach the society at large.The important implications of humility for the legal profession and beyond make its cultivation among law students and legal professionals highly desirable. I have also offered some suggestions about how humility could be fostered in the context of the legal professions, which I hope could provide food for thought about how to best design legal education, professional legal training, and legal institutional structures with a view to enhancing humility.Notes
1 I am grateful to Alessandra Tanesini, Pablo de Larranaga, and Iris van Domselaar for valuable comments on an earlier draft.
2 Such as constitutional law (Gerhardt: 2007; Lessig: 2019), legal theory (Sherry: 2017, Amaya: 2018); criminal law (Strang: 2017 and Sigler: 2018), evidence law (Haddad: 2015); law teaching (Noah: 2018) and legal theology (Fronnen: forthcoming and Marshall: 2017).
3 It is worth noting, however, that in addition to the well-documented association between humility and pro-social and affiliative feelings of appreciation for others, a recent study also shows that humility has another dimension which involves more anti-social, withdrawal-oriented feelings of self-abasement. Further empirical work would be needed to explain the complexity of the emotional experiences involved in humility. See Weidman, Cheng and Tracy (2018).
4 If this is on the right track, then worries about the potential tensions that there might exist between fostering humility in the legal professions and the current commercialization and competitiveness that these professions are undergoing, especially in the corporate sector, may be put to rest. I thank Iris Van Domselaar for raising this point.
5 Thus, the virtue of humility is arguably a tool to combat epistemic injustice.
6 Other virtues are, of course, also useful for preventing deliberative distortions in group deliberation. See (Amaya: forthcoming).
7 CfiAfano and Sullivan’s and Levy's chapter, in this volume.
8 On the differences between admiration and adoration, see Schindler et al. (2013).
9 The attainability of the model has also an important impact in its effectiveness. See Han et al. (2017). The point also holds in the context of professional organizations, see Moberg (2000).
10 For a discussion of the energizing vs. paralyzing effects of admiration, see Onu, Kessler and Smith (2016).
11 Humility in novices would thus be valuable in that it would help them to learn by example and humility in exemplars would be valuable in that it provides models that novices may imitate in order to develop humility.This picture, however, would be complicated if, as Nadelhoffer and Wright have suggested, humility were the ‘most stable shared attribute across moral exemplars (...) and the most stable unshared attribute between moral exemplars and moral novices.’ If validated, these claims would mean that humility would be a characteristic of exemplarity, thereby making it easier to develop this virtue through imitation, but it would also make it more difficult for imitation to be a general mechanism for virtue development if, as argued, humility in novices enables social learning.
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