Editor’s Note: The following are remarks presented by former Toledo Bar Association President John F. Hayward, at the TBA Annual Meeting held in July 1992, which have been edited by Associate Editor Mechelle Zarou. We present these wise words as a memorial to his passing in January 2024, as well as a reminder that while we have accomplished much of the agenda Mr. Hayward established during his presidency, we still have work to do, and we can do so with the dignity and grace of our profession evoked by these indelible words.
TBA Annual Meeting Remarks
Not even Frank Gallagher remembers the founding of the Toledo Bar Association in 1878. After all, he wasn't born until 23 years later, but when he was admitted to the Bar of Ohio in 1925, there were 350 lawyers practicing in this community with a population of 243,000. By 1942, when he was President of this Association, Toledo boasted 460 lawyers and a population of 282,349. When I was admitted to practice in 1966, there were 700 of us; 10 years later, that number had doubled. Today, our Association has 1,620 members and the population is 462,361.
In looking at ourselves historically and trying to see ourselves as others may see us, the comments of Alexis de Tocqueville are instructive. de Tocqueville specifically noted, with his uncanny prescience, the American proclivity for associational response to community interests. In 1840, he said:
Americans are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations...but religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large, and very minute...In every case, where in France you would find the government or in England some territorial magnate, in the United States you are sure to find an association.
Nothing, in my view, more deserves attention than the intellectual and moral associations in America. Even if we do notice them, we tend to misunderstand them, hardly ever having seen anything similar before. The most democratic country in the world now is that in which men have...carried to the highest perfection the art of pursuing in common the objects of common desires.
Another dead guy, Edmund Burke suggested that a healthy civilization exists with three relationships intact. It has a relationship with the present, a relationship with the future, and a relationship with the past. When the past feeds and sustains the present and the future, there is a healthy civilization. It seems appropriate then to reflect today on those relationships inside and outside the Toledo Bar Association.
How does this Association stand in the pursuit of our common desires? Frank Gallagher's presence here today embodies our relationship with those who have preceded us. Our observance, and your presence, validates our present concerns, and the membership numbers I reported verify our future interests.
As a second-generation Toledo lawyer, let me venture to assess where our Association has been, where we are now, and where we are going: an inside/outside state of the Bar, if you will. Let’s start outside, on the other side of the world. One of the big advantages Japan enjoys, we are often told, is that its 20,000 lawyers compare favorably with the million, more or less, of us. In Tokyo or Yokohama, things get done without a lot of complaining and stalling and suing and other inconvenient stuff. In Japan and most of the world, people know their place. They take what the company or the government gives them. They do what they are told. They get with the program -- or else.
Japan also has very few judges, a fact that effectively limits prospects for a young man facing a lifetime in prison, or a paraplegic who has been injured in an accident, or a mother or a father facing the loss of custody of a child, or a doctor anguished by a malpractice claim, or a young woman with an idea for a business that will bring new services, new goods and new jobs to her community.
Most Americans have a love-hate relationship with lawyers, but like us or not, we represent each American's first or last defense against the power of the bigs, whether big government or big corporations.[ZM1] We Americans are about the only people on earth with the individual power to do such things as making a school in Topeka take in a black kid named Brown or permit a woman named Hill to confront a man named Thomas and keep her job. A distinguished Ohio judge once said, "We dedicated ourselves to a powerful idea -- organic law rather than naked power. There seems to be universal acceptance of that idea in the Nation.”
While Potter Stewart's observation may describe the United States at its ideal best, in the real world of everyday life, we know that some of us are more equal than others. Lawyers work for money, so the odds in any courtroom will usually be against those who don't have much. But to its everlasting credit, the organized Bar of this country during the last decade has done its level best to minimize those odds by keeping the Legal Services Corporation afloat, by maintaining funding for the programs we know as Legal Aid [of Western Ohio] and ABLE and Public Defenders and making those courtroom odds a little shorter for most of the people most of the time.
Recently at a meeting of lawyers, a young woman said, "Let us remember what we are here for. We are here to ensure that this country, this wonderful country, will never again have to live through the repressions of the 1930's." Her name is Lyobuv Kolomenskya, one of the 27,000 lawyers in the former Soviet Union. She was speaking in Moscow, at a meeting to form the first bar association in her country. Surely Alexis de Tocqueville is smiling somewhere, watching Russian lawyers struggling to associate in support of a country ruled by law. Who knows? Someday the Russians and the Japanese might be lucky enough to live in a country with too many lawyers. It's enough to make you proud to be an American.
Locally, we are not the same community we were 50, 25 or even 10 years ago. The momentous shifts in the world economy that have buffeted American manufacturing industries, the core of our local economy during most of this century, swept waves of change over Toledo. It may be that some of our analytical skills would be useful in achieving perspective on those changes in the local economy, even as we go about the daily business of counseling and negotiating and litigating.
In Monday's edition of one of America's great newspapers, the departing dean of the Business College at the University of Toledo played de Tocqueville for Toledo. After two years here, he observed that Toledo's business community and political leadership have been unable to form a team with a united vision, instead waiting for initiatives from the state and federal governments that never come. “There’s already been damage and job loss," he said. "The main thing is, the various elements within Toledo and Lucas County have to come together. The region has to come together effectively as a team. Economic development is like a marriage. It's like anything else in life. You've gotta work at it." He had other advice for Toledo and even exercised his constitutional rights when asked to describe the Toledo business community in one word. "I plead the Fifth Amendment," he said.
Another thoughtful observer of our community, actually employed briefly by The Blade, Keith Burris, offered more specific comments on his departure a couple of years ago. …Toledo is, he said, "one of the few American cities where you can actually live - not just hassle out a living each day." But he noted three things he will not miss about Toledo: cronyism, self-absorbed negativism, and resistance to change. He found much worth preserving here but said Toledoans must first stop putting their community down. He asked, "Will this be a city where the way it has always been is insisted upon, or can it be a place that both remembers the past and welcomes the future?"
Parenthetically, having referenced the local newspaper, I feel compelled to pass on the following observation by a great American whose family was in the newspaper business, while speaking to a meeting of journalists: “It's not honest convictions honestly stated that concern me. Rather, it is the tendency of many papers...to argue editorially from the personal objective, rather than from the whole truth. As the old jury lawyer said: ‘And these, gentlemen, are the conclusions on which I base my facts.’”
That was Adlai Stevenson speaking.[ZM2]
What about the inside? What can we do? What can the members of this Association individually and collectively do in support of our common professional interests, and the larger interests of our community? I submit we can do a number of things. By respecting the past, specifically the traditions of this Bar Association and its innate practicality, we have instructive stories to tell and good examples to set regarding professionalism, alternative dispute resolution, legal aid and public interest law, and all the other buzz words and newly hatched definitions consultants and PR flacks inflict on us. Look for a moment if you will at the back of your program and note the committees of this Association focused on service: AIDS Assistance, Citizens Dispute Settlement, Legal Aid and Poverty Law, Minorities in the Profession, Pro Bono, Law Related School Education, Alternative Dispute Resolution, not to mention Lawyers Assistance, and Professionalism. Think for a moment of the volunteer assistance members of this Association offer to Camp Courageous, Habitat for Humanity and the St. Patrick’s Soup Kitchen, not to mention the countless unreported and uncompensated individual examples of legal services rendered daily by members of this Association to their fellow citizens.
Where do we hope to be a year hence? What should the priorities for the TBA be in the 12 months ahead? Bearing in mind Yogi Berra’s indisputable dictum that the future ain't what it used to be, your Board of Trustees will convene for its annual retreat in September to formulate some specific goals in that regard. We will look at ideas for broader membership services, for law library improvements, for growth of the Toledo Bar Foundation, at prospects for a bench and bar conference to foster good communication between our judges and the trial bar, and for ways to more effectively respond to the unmet legal needs of our fellow citizens who thus far lack representation. I invite your suggestions and ideas in that regard and I pledge full consideration of them.
What can individual lawyers do to maintain and advance respect for this legal system dedicated to the advancement of justice? First, we can generate respect by doing those things that deserve respect. Second, we can deal with each other, and with each other’s clients, in a professional manner that shows respect and courtesy without sacrificing any of the zealousness we owe our clients. Third, we can communicate with our clients to keep them aware of what is going on, and finally, we can educate the public about the legal process and the role that lawyers play.[ZM3]
It is useful for the present and for the future to assess our relationship to the past. We are not just playing music by dead guys. Efforts encompassed today under the rubric of alternative dispute resolution continue a proud tradition described as follows: “Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often the real loser -- in fees, and expenses, and waste of time. As a peacemaker, the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man (or woman). There will still be business enough.” Abraham Lincoln said that.
We need to respect that which we inherit and prepare to hand it on to the next generation. It is more difficult, perhaps, to articulate our own experience. What a person knows at 50 that he or she did not know at 20 is for the most part incommunicable. The knowledge acquired with age is not the knowledge of formulas or forms of words, but of people, places, action -- a knowledge not gained by words but by touch, sight, sound, victories, failures, sleeplessness, devotion, love…the human experiences and emotions of this earth and of one's self and of other men and women and perhaps, too, a little faith and a little reverence for the things you cannot see.
Let us remember day to day that law is but the means; justice is the end. It is a special privilege to practice a profession that enables us to become a part of the most important crises and the most important opportunities of our clients’ lives; to represent that young man facing the prospect of a lifetime in prison; to represent that paraplegic who has been injured in an accident; to represent that mother or father facing the loss of custody of a child; to represent that doctor anguished by a malpractice claim or to represent that entrepreneur who would bring new services, new goods, and new jobs to Toledo. If we remember the past, welcome the future, and challenge each other daily to remember that it is a privilege we exercise, we will do each other proud.
In the firm belief that the more you say, the less people remember, let me close with a prayer. It is attributed to the Irish, but it fits the needs of all beleaguered minorities:
May those that love us, love us;
And those that don't love us, may God turn their hearts;
And if he doesn't turn their hearts, may he turn their ankles;
So we'll know them by their limping.
We are adjourned.
