Defense Counsel Journal
President's Page - Volume 92, Number 1
Volume 92, No. 1
February 05, 2025
Donna Lamontagne
Donna Lamontagne
Donna Lamontagne is IADC President, 2024-2025.
Strengthening Our IADC Community, Part 2
Our IADC is an Intellectual, Adventurous, Diverse Community of exceptional lawyers and remarkable people. This is the first sentence of the message I wrote just a few months ago to promote the October, 2024 issue of the Defense Counsel Journal. Since then, the word Diverse has become a political football. As we head to our Midyear Meeting in Dana Point, starting on Super Bowl Sunday, it feels like the Super Bowl for lawyers is upon us too.
Our esteemed Editor, Peter Pizzi, pointed out in his foreword, that we are facing abrupt policy changes. Regardless of political affiliation, these are impacting the rule of law. How will we meet these challenges? Will we remain silent? When I took the gavel to lead this organization last July, I stressed the on-going need for civil dialogue. We need it now more than ever. We need voices of reason; voices of lawyers that have devoted their professional lives to serve the law, not any particular political party or individual. The voices of the authors in these scholarly articles are just such voices. On behalf of the entire membership, we thank them for their contribution to our community.
While this feels like a uniquely American moment, these are global issues that impact all of us. IADC members have voices in 49 countries and on 6 continents. We can be making a difference every day. Larry Smith, a long time IADC member and champion of inclusion, wrote to me this week and his eloquent words deserve repeating here for all to absorb. While we search for a politically palatable term to describe inclusion efforts, we should be reminded that our founders held it to be “self-evident” that “all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among them are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
May our process-based, law-based systems of government written by lawyers continue to be protected by lawyers.
- Donna Lamontagne, IADC President 2024-2025
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