Euler's identity: e^iπ + 1 = 0

	So long ago when we were taught That for whatever kind of puzzle you got You just stick the right formula in A solution for every fool — Indigo Girls, Least Complicated, Swamp Ophelia (1994)

»  Reprinted from the June 2009 issue of Louisville Bar Briefs   «

Before the 2008 campaign season changed history and realigned the American political landscape, I had always regarded Amy Ray and Emily Saliers as the most famous people with whom I shared a college campus in my youth. I will confess my bias in this regard. Few sources of beauty exceed that of the human voice at just the right pitch and timbre, rich in acoustic resonance, and most of all delivered at a frequency in the neighborhood of 220 hertz. Careful readers of this column have long known how much I like the Indigo Girls.

Consider the pivotal lines from the Indigo Girls' 1994 single, Least Complicated:

What makes me think I could start clean slated
The hardest to learn was the least complicated

Throughout my career in legal academia, I have spent considerable energy connecting law with ideas outside the strictly legal domain. The notion of the "least complicated" pervades many of the ideas that I have found most compelling:

• Within the grand linguistic hierarchy of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, it is the simple semiology of sound that is the most elusive. Human beings are born able to recognize thousands of phonemes, and infants have been observed working through a considerable number of them on their path to language. By childhood's end, however, virtually no human can competently utter sounds beyond the extremely narrow range used in her or his mother tongue.


• The world's most beautiful mathematical equation, e^iπ + 1 = 0, bridges the real and the imaginary, the rational and the transcedental, in a burst of breathtaking truth. Euler's identity contains the five most important numbers and performs three basic operations, exactly one time each.


• Up, down, charm, strange, top, bottom. To ponder physics to undertake a quest for truth and beauty, one and indivisible, now and forever. It is a journey that bridges the universe in its entirety, from basic constituents of matter to complex matters of love.

Action inside a deuterium nucleus containing a proton and a neutron, each with three quarks: An electron strikes a quark inside a proton, which passes energy to the quark before the electron bounces back. The energized quark triggers a cascade of new particles as it leaves the proton. Two new, two-quark particles emerge.

What does all of this has to do with law? Our discipline and our profession likewise obey the rule of the least complicated. Law, as practically demanding as inquiries into the foundational mysteries of language, mathematics, and physics are theoretically inspiring, also starts with basic building blocks.

The legal profession demands so much more of law schools than teaching our students to "think like lawyers." Nothing is more disappointing than the transmogrification of legal education into the dehumanizing drill and repetition of discrete doctrines. Virtually every judge and practicing lawyer asks that law schools endeavor to teach students skills that matter after graduation. Writing and oral advocacy, drafting and dealmaking. Experiential learning, from public service programs to live-client clinics. All of these things figure prominently on our Law School's agenda.

Yet I suspect that I can even more parsimoniously describe those things that lawyers and judges truly demand of legal education. The entire package might be reduced to the teaching of two core values: respect for the rule of law and civility toward clients, opposing counsel, and the agents of civil government.

Let us take this to the deepest available level. Law at its least complicated might be reduced to a single essential building block. I shall indulge an analogy to a religious innovation dating back roughly twenty centuries. All of law's codes, statutes, cases, rules, and regulations may be reduced to two great commandments. Love the rule of law with all your heart, and do unto others — lawyers, clients, judges — as you would have them do unto you.

What precisely is the rule of law? Kentucky's courts addressed this problem in connection with the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth. The 2009 celebration of Law Day featured, as it does every year, a judicial address on the meaning of the rule of law. Justice Daniel Venters delivered this year's keynote before the packed chamber of the House of Representatives. No matter how eloquently it is described, however, the rule of law faces a formidable barrier between expression and realization. The law as unitary entity is so immense that the idea of "rule of law," anchored to nothing but naked abstraction, offers no guidance on its own.

Happily, as it turns out, the two great commandments of the law are twin manifestations of the same action. Day to day, hand to mouth, we cannot possibly fathom the rule of law, much less treat it as an attainable aspiration. But we do know what it means to treat other professionals, our clients, and the public at large with the same level of civility we hope and expect to receive. To practice law with civility is to honor the rule of law. That may be all you know in law. Thankfully it is all you need to know.