Enhancing humility in the legal professions
Humility, I have argued, is highly relevant to legal organizations, legal practice, and professional development. Given the relevance of humility to the legal professions, it is worth asking which steps may be taken to develop it among law students, legal scholars, and practitioners.
How could we reconceive legal education and professional training so that it fosters humility? A first way in which the virtue of humility may be inculcated is through exposure to exemplars. As argued, humility enables social learning through example, but, like any other virtue, it can also be cultivated through imitation (Tangley: 2012).11 Exposing students to exemplary jurists who possess humility to a high degree and exercise it in their legal professional role, combined with critical discussion of such models, may be a productive path to developing this virtue. In a similar vein, given that leaders are important role models within their organizations, selecting humble leaders and praising humility in leadership in the diverse contexts of the legal professions may have a positive impact in humility development, as the distinctive way in which humble leaders relate to others and engage professionally permeates through the different levels of the organization (Vera and Rodriguez: 2004).A second way in which humility could be cultivated in the legal professions is through the study of comparative and international law or the inclusion of a comparative element in the study of the different branches of domestic law. Exposure to different cultures have been claimed to foster humility (Tangley: 2012). Similarly, the engagement with a diversity of legal cultures and perspectives that comparative and international law enables may arguably help law students and legal professionals in training to develop the virtue of humility. Likewise, it could be argued that diversity in different work environments, from the bench to law firms or public offices, is also beneficial for the purposes of inculcating humility in legal professionals (Nava: 2010).
An additional third way to promote humility in the legal profession could be through its explicit inclusion in strategies and professional codes of conduct. Just as it may be beneficial to include humility as an element in a firm's strategy and culture (Vera and Rodriguez: 2004), arguably, humility could be fostered by explicitly recognizing its value in the strategies of law schools, law firms, and public legal institutions. Likewise, professional codes may also be useful for promoting humility in law. Even though professional codes of conduct are limited instruments for inculcating the virtues, they still play an important role in conveying the values that the profession takes to be relevant, in providing standards for assessing professional conduct, as well as enabling criticism and discussion of core professional values. In this sense, the explicit inclusion of humility in professional legal codes may help highlight the relevance of humility for the legal professions and motivate law students and professionals to cultivate it.
A fourth venue for the development of humility is institutional design. Organizational structures and procedures, space design, and normative frameworks may foster (or be an obstacle to) virtuous behavior (Anderson: 2012). More modestly, one may attempt to nudge virtue, that is to say, to trigger behavior that is in accordance with virtue, through institutional design. For example, one could bring about open-mindedness in legal decision-making by asking jurists to overshoot on the side of charity in interpreting arguments (Aikin and Casey: 2016, 439) or indirectly promote impartiality by instructing jurors to seriously consider alternative views (Simon: 2004). Even if such behaviors would fall sort of virtue, as they do not arise out of virtuous motivations, still they may be a step toward development of (genuine) virtue. It is thus important to examine the normative, organizational, and spatial features of the context in which legal professionals work with a view to determining the extent to which they promote (or hinder) humility (or, at least, behavior that is in accordance with humility).
Several interventions to promote humility have been proposed in the field of positive psychology, and they may provide a (fifth) way in which humility in the legal professions may be fostered. Lavelock et al. (2014) administered an intervention which involved completing a workbook with several multi-modal exercises designed to promote humility and found that participants in the humility condition reported greater increases in humility across time than those in the control condition. Building on those results,Wright et al. (2017) have argued that humility could be fostered by developing primes and writing assignments that incorporate and promote the ‘semantic signature' of humility, i.e., the text features that, they found, are characteristic of humility, such as inclusive language, as well as language that maintains equality and emphasizes connectedness. The incorporation of interventions such as these (tailored to the legal professional context) in legal training could perhaps be an effective means for fostering humility among legal professionals.
Sixth, argumentation has been claimed to be conducive to the cultivation of (intellectual) humility (Kidd: 2016). Given the centrality of argumentation in legal practice, argumentation may afford a particularly suitable means of developing humility among legal professionals. Engaging in argumentation, however, only contributes to the development of humility if it is conceived as an edifying discipline. If the mode of argumentation and the conduct of those involved is aggressively adversarial, abusive, and fiercely competitive, rather than enhancing humility, it encourages pedantic attitudes in the ‘winners' and may seriously damage selfconfidence in the ‘losers' (Kidd: 2016, 400-401).Thus, the argumentative nature of law places legal professionals in an advantaged position to develop humility, but only if legal education and culture advice against the employment of forms of legal argument that may have corrupting, rather than positive, effects on character formation.
Last, legal education could promote humility by endorsing a style of teaching that informs law students about the complexity of knowledge, highlights the partiality of their perspectives, communicates to them respect for the discipline and the achievements of those who have contributed to shaping it, and engages them into practices such as dialectical exchange, receiving criticism, responding to feedback, revising their own views, and listening to alternative viewpoints (Kidd: 2017). Legal education could also enhance humility by helping students regulate their appraisals of their own weaknesses and strengths, and, correspondingly, their ambitions, as well as their attitudes toward others (i.e., students, legal professionals, and members of other professions who play important roles in law), collectives, and legal traditions (Kidd: 2017). Gaining knowledge has been claimed to promote (intellectual) humility, for a higher level of education is associated with appreciating the complexity of knowledge, its tentative nature, and the limits of one's knowledge (Krumrei-Marcuso et al., 2019). However, a higher level of education could also arguably lead to arrogance, bigotry, and pedantry. Hence, it seems critical that legal education wholeheartedly endorses a teaching style that helps develop the kind of attitudes and behaviors that are characteristic of humility.
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