The latest book entry in Thomas Shaffer's ongoing conversation with us, American Lawyers & Their Communities (1991) (with Mary Shaffer) (1991), takes the practice of community as its subject. In spirit, it appeals to us as members of communities to be and to do better, and it intimates how we can and why. This review of the book has turned out to be less a review than a response to that underlying appeal.

Each of the book's three parts focusses on a different form of communal practice: the ethics honored among lawyers, the rispetto observed by Italian-Americans, and the obligations laid upon religious believers.

In the first part Tom labors manfully with “the gentleman's ethic.” This is a real ethics and not the how-to-avoid-malpractice-suits instruction that passes for ethics in those continuing legal education programs lawyers are required to attend each year. Real ethics puts the questions of who we are and where we come from. In his view, we lawyers are gentlemen with gentlemanly virtues nurtured as habits of the heart by the republican and biblical traditions. The gentleman is our culture. The gentleman gazes down upon us from the walls of our courthouses, law firms and law schools and calls us to remember and to realize our traditional values. The gentleman who has gone before, the gentleman we now are and are to become furnishes us with guidance.