Divine Injustice: Myths of Good Lawyers & Other Legal Fictions
When former President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, invoked a rhetoric of judicial “combat” following the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, his words were an incantation, at once summoning centuries of terror and images of medieval warfare. But, by contextualizing this moment in the blood and birthright that underlie U.S. settler law, one can immediately position Giuliani’s comment as merely the latest in a his-tory of divinely unjust lawyering. Across this piece, I employ the phrase “divine injustice” to name this trend and to interrogate the violent irony of a U.S. legal system situated upon legacies of faith and fear, reflecting on my own lived experiences in enter-ing this profession of prophets and phantoms. This piece proceeds in two parts: (1) First, I ground this discussion in the historical origins of U.S. legal prophecy-making and pat-terns of legal hauntings; (2) second, I reflect on the forms of divine violence that characterized my legal education, with a focus on the calls by liberation movements for our collective unimagining of legal structures. As this piece makes clear, the ever-recurring narrative of U.S. lawyers as “prophets” of justice is by no means random; it is the predictable outcome of a legal system established through the assertion of divine rule, entrenched white supremacy, and judicially constructed faith and fear.