Lawyers as Peacemakers

 This guest post is from current Regent Law 2L Alejandro Cevallos:

This past summer I had the opportunity to intern for the Chief Judge of the Chesapeake, VA domestic relations court. Being fresh out of my first full year of law school I never imagined I would have the opportunity to submit an objective memo on a very twenty first century topic. The subject matter consisted of whether the court had jurisdiction to establish parentage between two legally married men as sole fathers and to remove the surrogate birth mother as the legal mother from the birth certificate. As a first-year law student I was both honored and nervous to work on my first official legal writing project, however, as a Christian, I must admit, I was torn between my moral conviction of disagreement with how this child was brought into the world. Thankfully, I was able to follow what St. Paul teaches us in Romans, which is to honor the authority, thus since the law permits this type of childbearing, I must do my part and submit a memo.

After reading a book by Mary Anne Glendon called A Nation Under Lawyers, I learned a valuable truth in one of the book’s chapters. Glendon talks about how many westerners, specifically Americans, have a negative connotation of lawyers, namely, that there are just too many lawyers.  She goes on to say, however, that we should apply the Abraham Lincoln mentality. Lincoln said, “If lawyers are peace makers, then there are not enough lawyers.” Glendon adds that as long as the law changes to keep up with modern society’s advancements we will always need good lawyers to study those laws and uphold them. This could not have been truer in my summer internship with the domestic relations Judge, in this challenging area of law.  Legal research revealed Virginia’s statutes addressing surrogate motherhood and parentage. My draft memo included law on this area of parentage as protecting the child, something a lawyer as a peacemaker can always do in good conscience.