I am astonished how effortlessly Nathalie Martin names, clarifies, and explores the perplexing, disorienting legal – yet deeply human – dilemmas we encounter, in such clear and simple language. Obviously an excellent teacher, her classroom acumen naturally carries over into an easy elegance throughout her writing, which makes this an eminently readable book.

She speaks with fierce wisdom and a refreshing depth of understanding. She examines those places where, following a legal calling, one invariably finds our most noble, universally accepted truths – justice, fairness, guaranteed access to “one's day in court,” a fundamental equality before the law – directly clashing, at times violently, with the sloppy, uncooperative “facts” of “real life.” These painful realizations can disrupt, challenge, and even ridicule our more hopeful expectations that anything we are called upon to defend equitably or represent as true will ever be an “easy” case.

Still – she honors the pain and confusion of being a lawyer in a world of exponential complexity, and fearlessly, yet mercifully, attends to this ever-changing rule of law in the world, as it intersects with the more personal, intimately tender gifts and challenges we encounter in our own inner and outer lives.

Can the arc of our inner life bend toward justice?

Martin does not shrink from addressing this question. As the world increasingly demands we function as part of an efficient legal machine – churning out more opinions, convictions, closed cases – what if our humanity (especially those irrational, intuitive, quiet knowings of the heart; things that both slow us down and invaluably aid in our discerning more accurately what is authentic, right, and true) ultimately helps us build a more just and honorable world? What if these emotional, sensitive, invisible knowings, our “human inefficiencies,” are demonstrably the most valuable tools in our toolbox? How can we honor the spirit, rather than merely the letter, of the law, if we lose our ability to hear those still, small voices of our own spirit, speaking clearly and reliably within us in every moment?