The best lawyer ever
October 15, 2011
“And the LORD said, If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes. And Abraham answered and said, Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes: Peradventure there shall lack five of the fifty righteous: wilt thou destroy all the city for lack of five? And he said, If I find there forty and five, I will not destroy it. And he spake unto him yet again, and said, Peradventure there shall be forty found there. And he said, I will not do it for forty’s sake. And he said unto him, Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak: Peradventure there shall thirty be found there. And he said, I will not do it, if I find thirty there. And he said, Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord: Peradventure there shall be twenty found there. And he said, I will not destroy it for twenty’s sake. And he said, Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak yet but this once: Peradventure ten shall be found there. And he said, I will not destroy it for ten’s sake. And the LORD went his way, as soon as he had left communing with Abraham: and Abraham returned unto his place.”
Genesis 18:26-33
Now there is a lawyer before the Law. The original bail of fifty is reduced to ten!
Exuvia's Weblog 
Perhaps this was divine training never to give up on a lost cause.
Almighty God, the giver of wisdom, without whose blessing study is ineffectual, without whose help resolution is vain, grant that I may attain such knowledge as shall qualify me to guide the doubtful and instruct the ignorant, prevent wrong and terminate contention and grant that I may use that knowledge which I shall attain to thy glory and my own salvation.
[ Dr Johnson’s “Prayer before the Study of the Law”]
A beautiful human character your Samuel. Our schools of Law and Society would be utterly and completely well served with humans like that.
God! are they few.
And then this…
“In the 1940s the local bar association had donated a wall plaque to the Law School and it had hung ever since in the central hallway of the School. The plaque was a quote from Samuel Johnson entitled “A prayer before the study of the law.”
A Jewish student had objected to the plaque and its explicitly Christian message and, after consulting with my constitutional lawyers on the faculty (and armed with a vision of Thomas Jefferson’s legacy as the author of the Virginia Declaration on Religious Freedom), I had the plaque taken down in obedience to the First Amendment.”
[WILLIAM J. STUNTZ, Harvard Law review; Vol. 124:1841, p. 1853]