Fisherman Jack: Living in "Juropolis"- The Fishing Village of the Law

This Symposium celebrating and honoring the scholarship and teaching of my dear friend and colleague Jack Sammons provides a fitting occasion to follow up on a suggestion he made to me a couple of years ago. The occasion is especially fitting because, as I proceed with my account, I invite us to think about how Jack himself embodies and exemplifies this account in his own life. Specifically, I will extend Alasdair MacIntyre's short and partial narrative image of fishing crews and the fishing village and apply it to the "fishing village of the law," which I call "Juropolis." In doing so I will also rely upon several of MacIntyre's works presenting the general theory that his narrative image illustrates.3 In some important respects I draw inferences from what MacIntyre has written in these sources. However, I trust that my inferences are fair and reasonable ones.

The Article is part of a larger project developing several narrative images of which MacIntyre's communitarian image of fishing crews and the fishing village is the foundational one. The project has two related goals: first, to reinforce lawyers' and law students' vocation to the values and virtues of professionalism-for example, the values and virtues that Pat Longan seeks to cultivate in his wonderful course on The Legal Profession; and second, to dramatize why such vocation is important for living a good life in the law that is meaningful, satisfying, and fulfilling- a life that is "happy" in the Aristotelian sense, a life that is a "flourishing" life.