Radical Love in the Practice of Law: Dr. King’s Enduring Challenge to Modern Advocates
President
Earl B. Gilliam Bar Association
In the popular imagination, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is often reduced to a handful of quotations, a single holiday, or a softened narrative of inevitable progress. But the King who wrote “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and who stood at the Mason Temple in Memphis on April 3, 1968, the night before his assassination, was not offering comfort. He was issuing a demand. That demand was grounded in what might best be described as radical love, a disciplined, uncomfortable, and courageous commitment to human dignity that refuses neutrality in the face of injustice.
For lawyers practicing today across criminal defense, civil rights, labor, immigration, corporate law, employment, and beyond, King’s radical love is not an abstraction. It is a professional ethic that challenges how we understand justice, how we wield power, and how we define success in the law.
Radical Love Is Not Passive
In “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King responds to white clergy who urged patience, moderation, and restraint. Their concern was not whether injustice existed, but whether King’s actions were untimely. King’s reply remains one of the most penetrating critiques of professional complacency ever written:
“Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”
King rejected the idea that injustice should be tolerated in the name of order. He insisted that unjust laws must be confronted, not merely endured, because delay imposed on the marginalized is itself a form of violence.
For lawyers, this insight is enduring. The profession prizes process, precedent, and decorum, all of which serve important purposes. But radical love demands more than technical mastery. It calls lawyers to recognize when procedure is being used to shield injustice, when institutional caution becomes moral abdication, and when doing one’s job substitutes for doing what is right.
Neutrality, Common Sense, and the Cost of Silence
King’s critique of moderation also exposes a subtler danger in legal practice: the uncritical reliance on neutral reasoning, including appeals to so-called common sense. Courts and lawyers often invoke common sense as if it were universal and self-evident, when in reality it is shaped by lived experience, culture, and power.
When lawyers fail to interrogate whose experiences are being treated as normal or obvious, common sense can quietly legitimize discriminatory assumptions about race, class, language, or belonging. King understood this dynamic well. In Birmingham, what was called reasonable or orderly made sense only to those insulated from segregation’s daily harms.
Radical love requires lawyers to resist this quiet drift toward injustice. It asks them to speak when comfortable assumptions mask structural harm, and to challenge reasoning that appears neutral but reproduces inequality. This is not about abandoning reason, but about grounding legal judgment in empathy, humility, and a clear-eyed understanding of power.
Loving the Client the System Dehumanizes
King’s radical love was neither sentimental nor naïve. It was disciplined, accountable, and profoundly human. Importantly, it extended to those that society deemed unworthy of empathy.
In legal practice, this ethic is most visible when representing people pushed to the margins: the accused, the poor, the undocumented, the incarcerated, the wrongfully terminated. Radical love demands that lawyers see clients not as case files or risks to be managed, but as full human beings navigating systems often designed to punish, exclude, or extract.
This does not mean excusing harm or abandoning professional judgment. King was clear-eyed about wrongdoing and conflict. But he refused to equate a person’s worth with their worst moment or least powerful position. For lawyers, radical love means practicing in ways that restore dignity in systems that routinely strip it away.
Radical Love in Corporate and Business Law
Radical love is not confined to public interest or plaintiff side practice. Lawyers who represent corporations, institutions, and businesses are no less implicated in its demands. Because corporate counsel advise decision-makers with enormous influence over workers, consumers, and communities, the ethical stakes may be even higher.
For business lawyers, radical love does not require abandoning zealous representation or economic reality. It calls for embracing the role of ethical counselor, not merely legal technician. It means advising clients not only on what is legally permissible, but on what is just, sustainable, and humane. It means having the courage to challenge practices that exploit legal gray areas at the expense of human dignity.
In this way, radical love becomes a form of professional leadership, the willingness to speak truth to power and to remind institutions that their legitimacy depends not only on compliance, but on conscience.
Courage Without Certainty
In his final speech, King acknowledged fear, exhaustion, and the real possibility that he would not live to see the fruits of his labor:
“I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”
Radical love offers no guarantees. It does not promise victory, approval, or safety. It demands fidelity to principle, to conscience, and to people without certainty of outcome. For lawyers trained to measure success in wins and losses, this ethic can feel unsettling. Yet it is precisely what gives the work its deeper meaning.
Practicing Law as an Act of Hope
Dr. King understood that professionals do not stand outside history. Lawyers, whether they acknowledge it or not, help shape the moral boundaries of society. Every argument advanced, policy defended, or decision advised either reinforces existing inequities or bends the arc of justice toward dignity.
Radical love invites lawyers to practice with intention, to reject easy neutrality, to question comfortable assumptions, and to place human dignity at the center of their work. It does not ask lawyers to be perfect, but to be brave. It does not demand certainty, but commitment.
In a moment marked by polarization, inequality, and deep distrust of institutions, the legal profession has a rare opportunity. Practiced with radical love, the law can become more than a set of rules. It can be a vehicle for empathy, accountability, and collective hope. Dr. King believed that such love could move history forward. The enduring question is whether today’s lawyers are willing to let it guide their practice.
André Ríos Bollinger
President
Earl B. Gilliam Bar Association
