Ring out the Old, Ring in the New
 

Happy New Year! A new year brings new resolutions – it offers the possibility of a fresh start. Although we could make a resolution any day of the year, the start of a new one concentrates the mind. Tennyson’s poem continues with the exhortation to ‘Ring in the love of truth and right/Ring in the common love of good’. And so we resolve annually to eat less, to exercise more, to spend quality time with family and so on and so forth. Within a week or two, however, we remember just how hard it is to break old patterns. So it is important to make resolutions that can be met – with a bit of willpower. Resolutions should really be about character or habits, rather than goals or achievements.

It is a good exercise to consider resolutions for our professional practice. In line with the idea that this is not about setting goals, but about changing habits or character, we probably should not make the obvious resolution of billing more, or giving less credit to clients. Perhaps our professional resolutions might be one or more of the following, or some variation of them:
 

1   To set aside five percent of one’s time for pro bono work.

2   To get home at least two hours before one’s kids go to bed.

3   To send every client away feeling that his lawyer did his absolute best for him.

4   To hone one’s skills through professional development.

5   To teach at one workshop (at least) to give knowledge back to the profession.

6   To counsel younger members of the profession.

At time of writing, my family and I are due to spend Christmas in the snowy depths of Finland, on the edge of the arctic circle. We go in search of Santa Claus, and hope to find him, in a log cabin, deep in the pine forests. Reindeer, huskies and snowmobiles will complete the arctic experience. The kids will make the opposite of resolutions – giving report cards to Santa to the effect that they have after all been good in 2005. It will be good to get far away from the travails of practice for a couple of weeks. I wonder though how often I will take refuge in the saunas for which the Finns are justly famous.

In the last two weeks of November, I received letter after letter from bar associations in Australia, seeking our help to sway the Cabinet in its decision on the clemency petition of Nguyen Tuong Van and the appeals of his family and friends. Council deliberated carefully on the requests made by our Australian counterparts. We felt considerable sympathy and could see clearly how strongly emotions were running. We understood that in the 20 years after they abolished the death penalty, it had become unthinkable to many Australians. But we did not accept the suggestion that the death penalty – whether itself or in its mandatory form – is against international law, nor did we feel that we had a role to play in lobbying for clemency. The mitigating and extenuating factors that were relied on – principally that the man was only in transit to Australia and had cooperated with the police – were all matters that had been communicated directly to the President’s office. And so we replied, politely to be sure, but firmly declining to act on their requests to champion Nguyen Tuong Van’s cause.

Nonetheless, Council believes that the issue of sentencing policy should be re-visited periodically. The death penalty has been on our radar screen for a number of years. Times do change, and laws may need to change too. The legal profession has a special interest and expertise in this area. Criminology, while incorporating sociological and other perspectives, is a discipline that many lawyers have studied. So in 2006 the question of the death penalty may well be something that the profession should study, and present its views. Issues of deterrence, proportionality and humanity are involved, and require full consideration.

After all, when Tennyson wrote of ringing out the old and ringing in the new, he also urged mankind to ‘Ring in the nobler modes of life/With sweet manners, purer laws’.

Philip Jeyaretnam, SC

President

The Law Society of Singapore