Empathy and the Legal Profession: A Partnership, Not a Paradox.

By: Christine E. Ohenewah, J.D. | March 24, 2025

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Christine E. Ohenewah is a Lawyer, Humanist, and Professor building a university that transforms how people understand and claim power. She is the Founder of The Elizabeth Tweneboah Foundation, where she is creating a new model of higher learning that builds creators over consumers and empowers individuals to construct lives aligned with their potential. Her flagship initiative, Men's Rea™, uses legal reasoning to help men build self-governance systems that drive them toward purpose. A graduate of Cornell Law School, Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and Macalester College, and former White Collar Investigations lawyer, her interdisciplinary work in legal and humanistic thought, power, and gender has been featured in Business Insider, USA Wire, and New York Weekly. She writes and speaks on masculinity, legal thinking, and the future of education, and serves as faculty at three universities in Criminology, Sociology, and Law and Ethics.

Empathy is a trait seldom used to characterize the legal profession. In an adversarial profession that prizes competition, detachment, and rational choice, the idea of law and empathy may appear drastically juxtaposed. Sacrilegious. An unholy union.

It is a mistake to presume this.

The legal profession could benefit from an infusion of empathetic reframing. If we treat the law merely as a cold, rigid system that ignores the complexities and imperfections that constitute the very humans it seeks to protect and reproach, and if we treat lawyers and judges alike as stoic arbiters of the law, we as lawyers miss a huge opportunity to expand the meaning of our role as lawyers in society––one that seizes the opportunity to engage with the rest of the populous from an empathetic and humanistic vantage point, rather than a regimented framework of objectivity and economic efficiency.

Indeed, the legal profession naturally prioritizes service to our clients. While this is wonderful, it is indefinitely limiting. It is wonderful because it means that every time we are approached by a client, there is a presumption that they have entrusted in us their faith in our ability to solve their dilemmas. This is an honor, and this honor creates the opportunity for us to extend empathy and compassion toward the sensitive nature of our clients’ issues. However, the assumption that client representation is one of the few domains in which lawyers can exercise empathy-based practice limits the parameters of our work with respect to the broader public. The quid pro quo nature of the legal profession disincentivizes the opportunity to do “good” beyond the billable hour, beyond business development (i.e., massaging our friends into future clients), and beyond traditional markers of success and recognition. This cripples our chance to expand meaning-making within our roles.

As a lawyer who now educates students from all walks of life, I would argue that regardless of which sector of society we comprise, we as lawyers have a duty to regard everyone––not just the clients who pay us––with empathy and reverence for the human condition. We have a duty to show every person we encounter that our concerns are not merely sequestered to what is permissible under the letter of the law but that we are also concerned with humanizing our fellow neighbor and uplifting their livelihood. This can be demonstrated through a simple smile to a stranger on the train or in the grocery store. It can mean making goofy faces at a wailing infant until you see her ogling at you with curiosity and an eventual grin. It can mean inspiriting the confidence of college first-years who walk into your office for advice on their impressive dreams and ambitions––dreams and ambitions that you yourself wish you would have had at their current life stage. All of this comes with first knowing that we are more than cogs in a system. We are the system. And we are greater than the system.

Ultimately lawyers have an opportunity to promote values that extend more meaningfully beyond rational choice and economic efficiency. We have an opportunity to use our profession to demonstrate a conscientious regard for the value of human life beyond what the law and the legal profession allocate. We as lawyers have been accorded the benefit of being stereotyped as chasing the pursuit of justice––regardless of this stereotype’s accuracy. And if we care about the pursuit of justice, then it must mean that we care about others being treated fairly. And if we care about others being treated fairly, then it follows that we care about the greater good for all.

I can say that some of us do care. My outrageous hope is that all of us will care.

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