Déclaration

Bonne Foi

It is written into every contract, presumed of every person, and it has been the law of this land since the Digest of 1808, when two lawyers in New Orleans sat down to write a civil code in French for a territory the rest of the country expected to fall in line with English common law. They chose otherwise, and good faith was among the principles they carried forward from the Roman and French traditions that shaped this place long before the American flag flew over it.

We named this project for that principle because the legal system has broken the promise it represents. A mother with no heat calls seven firms and none call back. A tenant facing eviction with sixteen days on the clock finds that the only help available is a two-month waitlist. A woman with a protection order and a custody hearing cannot afford the retainer that stands between her and safety. The system did not fail because lawyers are indifferent; ninety-nine percent of them want to help. It failed because the infrastructure connecting them to the people who need them was never built.

Bonne foi is the commitment to build it honestly. We triage even when that means routing away from us. We match on real public case history, never invented win rates. We lock the send button until you have made the words your own. Good faith is not a slogan but an engineering constraint on every feature we ship.

Bon Secours

Bon secours is the duty to come to the aid of those in need, and in the civil law tradition it is something more than charity. It is obligation. French law makes it a crime to fail to render assistance to a person in danger, and the principle holds that when you see someone in peril and you have the power to help, silence is not neutrality but abandonment.

The faith this project is named for is not the property of any one church. Louisiana’s history is Catholic, and this story is told in that language because that is the language the place was built in. But the grace we mean is older and wider than any one religion: the grace of God however you name Him, the divine aid that arrives in the shape of a storm, a stranger, a saint in an unexpected form. That grace belongs to everyone.

If you want to know what bon secours looks like in practice, consider the man who wrote our civil code.

Louis Moreau-Lislet was born on a coffee plantation in the mountains above Cap Français in French colonial Saint-Domingue, the place we now call Haiti. He earned his law degree in Paris just before the Revolution of 1789, returned to the island, and in 1803 boarded a small ship called L’Alexandrine for a routine reassignment up the coast. A storm blew the ship into open water and British privateers forced it further off course, until it landed in Santiago, Cuba, instead of Cap Français. By the time Moreau-Lislet would have arrived at his destination, the city had fallen to the Haitian revolutionaries and nearly every French official there was dead. Par la grâce de Dieu et le bon secours de la tempête. By the grace of God and the good aid of the storm.

Moreau-Lislet made his way to New Orleans, argued over two hundred cases before the Louisiana Supreme Court, and in 1806 was commissioned by the territorial legislature to draft the civil code that would define this state’s legal identity for the next two centuries. The Digest of 1808 was the first civil code-like legislation drafted anywhere in the world in the wake of the Napoleonic codification, and its principal author was a refugee who got here because the wind blew the wrong way. Or, perhaps, the right way. He is buried in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, and his former home still stands on Chartres Street in the Quarter.

Sometimes bon secours is a person, sometimes it is a statute, and sometimes it is a storm that carries a lawyer to the place where he is needed most.

Today, ninety-two percent of low-income Americans with substantial civil legal problems receive no help or inadequate help. Forty-nine percent of people who reach out to legal aid are turned away.⁴ Ninety percent of tenants in eviction court have no lawyer while ninety percent of landlords do.⁵ These are not statistics but people standing alone in a system designed to be navigated with counsel, and the absence of representation is itself a kind of sentence, handed down before anyone has spoken a word.

God does not always send a storm. Sometimes He sends angels and saints in the most unexpected and disarming of human forms, to build the infrastructure that gives you shelter from the one that is coming. That is what we are trying to do: honest triage, party mapping, attorney matching, outreach drafting, and the kind of continuity tracking that lets people climb the intake wall once, and never lose weeks re-telling their story to doors that close. We serve the hospital cafeteria worker, the retail manager sued for a debt she may not owe, the single mother whose landlord has a lawyer and whose language is not the language of the courtroom. We find them the attorney who could actually help, and we carry their summary forward until a door opens.

We serve the lawyers too. More than half of donated pro bono hours, by many program estimates, are consumed by intake rather than advocacy. We hand attorneys a structured matter summary that drops into the systems they already use, so that the hour they volunteer is spent in a courtroom and not on a form.

On a deeply personal note, my father’s soul was set free in a Bon Secours hospital, surrounded by the people who loved him and with the grace of God. The name on the wall meant what it said. Good help, good aid, good protection. He received all three.

Bonne Grâce

The first two principles are legal. This one is not. Bonne grâce is a moral principle, a human one, a thing of the soul. The law can require good faith and it can mandate the duty to aid, but it cannot compel grace. Grace is freely given or it is nothing at all.

Before there was Lafitte, before the Baratarians, before the bayou bandits of the Gulf, there was Gráinne Ní Mháille.

Her English name was Grace O’Malley. Grace.

In the sixteenth century she commanded a fleet along the west coast of Ireland, taxed every ship that crossed her waters, and earned a reputation as both a rebel and a pirate. Her clan’s motto was Terra Marique Potens: powerful by land and sea. When the English governor of Connacht imprisoned her sons, she did not petition through channels but sailed up the Thames, walked into Greenwich Palace, and met Queen Elizabeth as an equal. She refused to bow because she did not consider herself a subject. Before the audience was granted, the Crown required her to answer eighteen written questions about her life, her family, her career, and the status of women under Gaelic law. The two women spoke in Latin, came to terms, and her sons were released. Two seasoned, creative, underestimated women in their sixties, both leading in a world that told them they could not. Perhaps Elizabeth saw something of herself across the table. She extended bonne grâce to Grace.⁶

Two centuries later the Irish came to New Orleans by the tens of thousands, carrying her spirit whether they knew her name or not. They came because the port was open and the passage was cheap, but they also came because the city was Catholic, like home. By 1860 one in five New Orleanians was Irish. They built the churches and dug the canals and fought alongside Andrew Jackson and buried their dead in unmarked graves along the waterways they carved through the swamp. They were not gentle people and they did not wait to be invited, and the grace they carried was not the soft kind. It was the kind that sails into a throne room uninvited and refuses to kneel.

Bonne grâce is the quality the law cannot compel but without which justice is incomplete: the decision to act not merely within the rules but with compassion, with dignity, with care for the human being on the other side of the transaction. It is what Grace O’Malley carried into Greenwich Palace, not supplication and not rage, but the sovereign certainty that she belonged there and that the matter would be resolved because it had to be.

The legal system, at its worst, is graceless. It speaks in language designed to exclude, imposes deadlines on people who do not know they are running, and punishes confusion as though it were contempt. Bonne grâce is the commitment to build differently. We write in the language people actually speak. We do not hide the complexity of their situation but we refuse to weaponize it either. When the honest answer is “you do not need a lawyer for this,” we say so, even though it means routing away from our own product. When the honest answer is “this is serious and you need help now,” we say that too, and we say it plainly. We treat every person who comes to us as though they are already the client of the attorney they have not yet found, with the same care, the same confidentiality, the same respect.

We extend that grace to the profession itself because we believe that the attorneys who want to help, and nearly all of them do, deserve infrastructure that makes helping possible. The law, at its best, is an act of grace: the commitment of a society to resolve its disputes with reason rather than force, with fairness rather than wealth, with mercy rather than indifference. Justice without that mercy is arithmetic, and the people we serve deserve more than math.

Why Louisiana

La Salle claimed the Mississippi Valley for France in 1682 and named it for his king. Bienville founded New Orleans in 1718 on the crescent bend of the river, a hundred miles upriver from the mouth where it meets the Gulf. The Ursuline nuns arrived in 1727 and opened a hospital, and the St. Louis parish church was completed the same year. From the beginning this was a place built on faith, and faith here was not abstract but institutional. The Catholic Church did not merely minister to the colony but organized it, and civil life was structured around church parishes, which is why Louisiana has sixty-four parishes to this day while the other forty-nine states have counties. The word is not decorative. It is a record of how this place was made.

The same faith that organized the colony also sanctioned its greatest sin. The Code Noir, first issued in 1724, governed the lives of enslaved people in French Louisiana, and New Orleans became the largest slave market in the American South. The sugar fields that made the colony wealthy were worked by people who had no share in that wealth, no standing in the courts, and no claim to the code that was supposed to belong to everyone. The civil law tradition this document celebrates was, for more than a century, a tradition that wrote human beings out of its own promise. We do not say this to qualify the tradition. We say it because bonne foi requires it. Good faith means facing every crack in the house you are trying to repair, including the ones that bring tears.

Spain took Louisiana from France in 1763 and held it for nearly four decades; its second governor was Alejandro O’Reilly, an Irishman by birth who served a Catholic crown. France took it back briefly in 1800, and in 1803 the United States purchased 828,000 square miles of territory for fifteen million dollars, the largest land deal in history. The terms were simple: this land is now American.

But the people who lived there did not agree to become something else.

When Louisiana entered the Union in 1812 as the eighteenth state, it was expected to adopt the common law system that governed the other seventeen: English precedent, English procedure, English thinking. Every state before it had done so, and every state after it would do the same. Louisiana refused.

It kept the civil code, the French tradition of written law over judicial precedent, the vocabulary and structure and philosophy of a legal system rooted in Rome, shaped by Paris, and carried across the Atlantic by the people who built New Orleans. Governor Claiborne, a common law lawyer who understood neither French nor Spanish, tried to impose the Anglo-American system and the legislature pushed back. The code Moreau-Lislet wrote was built on the principle that law belongs to the people, written plainly enough for them to read it and organized clearly enough for them to find themselves in it. That idea came from the same intellectual tradition that produced the Déclaration des droits de l’homme in 1789, and it holds that the law is not a guild secret or the private language of a priestly class but a public thing, available to everyone, belonging to no one.

This, it should be said, is a place that has never waited for permission.

As many crowns have done, the colonial powers left their people to fend for themselves more often than not, and the colonists of Louisiana learned to do exactly that. By the time the Americans arrived, New Orleans had already been navigating its own course for a century on the resourcefulness of people who did not ask whether something was conventional before doing it. Jean Lafitte, the bandit king of Barataria Bay, ran a smuggling operation through the bayous south of the city and sold contraband at prices that undercut every legal merchant in town. When Governor Claiborne put a $300 bounty on his head, Lafitte responded by offering $1,000 for the capture of the governor. When the British offered him a fortune and a captaincy in the Royal Navy to help invade New Orleans during the War of 1812, Lafitte turned them down, offered his men and his gunpowder to Andrew Jackson instead, and helped win the Battle of New Orleans on January 8, 1815. President Madison pardoned him and Jackson called him one of the ablest men on the field. His blacksmith shop on Bourbon Street is still open. It is a bar now, which feels about right.

And Lafitte’s lawyer, the man who kept the Baratarians out of prison? Edward Livingston, the same man who alongside Moreau-Lislet and Pierre Derbigny drafted the Civil Code of 1825. Livingston had lost everything to a clerk’s embezzlement in New York, sold all he owned to cover the debt, and sailed to New Orleans to start over. He ended up writing the charter of a legal tradition and defending the most notorious bandit in the Gulf of Mexico, in the same career.

Even the bandits had a code. Before a pirate ship left port, every crew member signed the Articles of Agreement, their own charter governing the division of shares, compensation for injury, and the rules of conduct at sea. The first article of Bartholomew Roberts’ code read: “Every man shall have an equal vote in the affairs of moment.” They elected their captains, voted on their course, and called it the Charter Party. When the law of nations refused to recognize them, they wrote their own.

Louisiana did the same thing. Forty-nine states adopted the common law that came across the Atlantic from England, and Louisiana looked at that system, looked at its own, and wrote its code. Refugees and bandits and lawyers who spoke five languages and fought the governor and drafted the law in French because that was the language of the people it belonged to. It was singular, it was untamed, and it was never supposed to be tidy.

Two centuries later Louisiana remains the only civil law jurisdiction in the United States. Forty-nine states went one way. Louisiana went another, not out of stubbornness but out of conviction that its tradition was worth preserving, that the code was not an obstacle to joining the Union but a gift it brought with it.

Louisiana is the one state that kept the civil code, the only ground where bonne foi is written law. It is also losing itself, a coastline slipping into the Gulf, close to 2,000 square miles gone since 1930. A place that is disappearing and enduring at once knows better than anywhere what hors commerce means: some things cannot be bought, and some cannot be bought back.

There is a doctrine in the Louisiana Civil Code, inherited from the French tradition and rooted in Roman law, that divides all things into categories. Some things are private, meaning they are in commerce and can be owned, bought, and sold. But some things are common or public: the air, the high seas, the navigable waters, the public squares. These things are hors commerce, outside of commerce and insusceptible of private ownership, and they cannot be transacted, not because someone chose not to sell them but because they were never the kind of thing that could be sold.

The Louisiana Purchase was a transaction. Fifteen million dollars for 828,000 square miles. The land was in commerce and the rivers, the ports, the sugar fields changed hands. But the soul of a people, their law, their language, their faith, their way of understanding justice, was hors commerce. It was never part of the deal and it could not have been. Some things exist outside the reach of any transaction, not because they are protected by statute but because they are, by their nature, not the kind of thing that can be exchanged.

L’âme est hors commerce.

Bonne Foi is built in that spirit. The guiding principles are not in commerce and not for sale. Our organization's north star is one of them. It is, like the air and the water and the law that Louisiana carried into the Union, something that belongs to everyone and to no one.

The eighteenth state kept the code. We keep the faith.

An Ode to the Eighteenth State⁷

To the people of Louisiana.

To the ones who kept the code when the rest of the country chose a different path. To Moreau-Lislet, the refugee from Saint-Domingue who survived a storm and a revolution to draft a civil code in French for a territory that was supposed to speak English. To Livingston, the New Yorker who lost everything and sailed south to start over, and who ended up writing the law and defending the bandit king in the same life. To Derbigny, who wrote the opinion in Cottin v. Cottin declaring that the old laws were still in force, and who later became governor. To Lafitte, who chose New Orleans over the British Navy, and whose name still marks a national park, a town, and the best bar on Bourbon Street. To Grace O’Malley, the original pirate queen, Terra Marique Potens, whose children crossed the Atlantic and made this city their own.

To the legislators who fought Claiborne and won. To the judges who still consult the Civil Code of France when the meaning of an article is unclear, two centuries later, because that is where the tradition lives.

To the ones who gave us parishes instead of counties because faith was never separate from the law here. To the ones who insisted that law should be written down, organized, and made accessible, not buried in centuries of case reports that only lawyers could read.

To the city that gave the world jazz and the second line and the Saints and a way of being alive that no other American city has ever managed to replicate or fully understand. There is no place in this country like New Orleans. There never has been.

To the people of Baton Rouge, Shreveport, Lafayette, Lake Charles, and every town in between. To the ones who need a lawyer and cannot find one. To the ones who have been turned away, placed on a waitlist, or told their problem is not the right kind of problem. To the ones standing alone in a courtroom built for two sides, with only one side represented.

This is for you. This was always for you.

We are planning formation in the State of Louisiana because this is where the tradition lives, where the civil code was kept, where bonne foi is not a borrowed phrase but a birthright. But the mission does not stop at the state line. For two centuries the rest of the country treated Louisiana’s legal tradition as a curiosity, a charming anomaly in a common law nation. Perhaps it is time to treat it as an instruction. We will not force conformity, because we are individualists and that would betray every pirate in this story, but we will offer what the tradition preserved to anyone who needs it, wherever they are. We have parishes. We respect your counties. The work crosses both.

And if the work reaches past Louisiana, it reaches first to the country next door. We love the Gulf South, and we mean it as one place: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and the coastal reaches of Texas and Florida. This is not a place short of good lawyers; it has a deep bar and firms that have practiced here for generations. What it does not have is the big national firms, the litigation and transactional machine that clusters in New York and Washington and treats a matter down here as too small to staff, or flies in on a single case, associates local counsel, and leaves. The storms do not honor that line, and neither do the dockets. The same water that takes one state’s marsh takes the next one’s, and a family stands unrepresented in Jackson or Mobile exactly as it does in New Orleans. Our troubles here are bound together, so the help should be too. Perhaps this is where we start, and build the bridge from the near shore out.

And for those of you reading this: we welcome you to join us. Help us carry the mission. Contribute to this declaration, which is a living document and meant to be added to. Join our board of directors as an anchor partner. The table has room, and the crossing is wide enough to need every hand.

Read the story again and it is a fight over ground from the first page. The Irish took to the sea because the land was never theirs to keep. The laws written by the people who had taken it barred a Catholic from owning the good soil or holding any of it with security, and the ships were the one road left open. Grace O’Malley commanded the water because the water was the one thing the land law could not seize. Her children crossed an ocean to a place the United States had bought by the square mile, and they built it and dug it and were buried in it. The subject has not changed since. It was always the land. It is still the land.

Wherever in this nation a person needs a lawyer and cannot find one, we will be there as a resource they can reach. The sector calls them underrepresented. In a courtroom the word loses its cushion and becomes the truer one: unrepresented, no lawyer at all, standing where counsel should be. That gap between those who have representation and those who do not is a second verdict, delivered before the hearing begins, and closing it is the whole of what access to justice means.

We are building a bridge. The Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, twenty-four miles of concrete over open water, is the longest bridge of its kind in the world, and it exists because someone looked at the distance between two shores and decided the crossing was worth engineering. Every bridge is a crossing, and in a Catholic city, that word has never been small. Bonne Foi is that kind of infrastructure. We start with access to justice because that is the fight in front of us, but a bridge, once built, carries whatever needs to cross, and this one may yet reach other distances in law, in justice, in aid, wherever the gap between those who are equipped and those who stand alone hardens into a verdict.

And a privateer is only a pirate who was handed a letter of marque, chartered by a power that needed a fight won and trusted the crew that could win it. That is how a vessel built in New Orleans ends up needed far from the water it was launched on.

So we go where the fight goes. On land, where a family holds the ground beneath it or loses it. On the water, where the Gulf is taking the coast back and the land is going under. And before long in the air over both, in seasons that never used to burn and questions no code has yet answered. Land, sea, and sky. The old privateers worked two of the three. We may not have the luxury of stopping there.

They say this city was built by refugees, pirates, outlaws, bandits, and people who did not wait for permission. It has burned to the ground twice and risen from its own ash. It has survived yellow fever, Betsy, Katrina, Ida, and every flood the Gulf has sent through the bayou and up the delta. For three centuries the pirates found shelter from the storm in New Orleans: the refugees, the pioneers, the exiles, the ones the world did not want, the ones who needed a port and a fresh hand and a place that would not ask too many questions. This city took them all in, gave them a code, a home, and a second life. A promised land for people who had been promised nothing.

And every promised land is reached by water: a river for one people, an ocean for another, an inland sea for the ones who walked west. This one had the Mississippi. The Haitians came by sea when the revolution took their island.

And the people who did not come by choice. The enslaved Africans who were brought to this delta in chains, who built the levees and worked the sugar fields and raised the city from the swamp with labor that was never compensated and never acknowledged in the code that was supposed to belong to everyone. They created Congo Square, where music and language and faith survived because the people who carried them refused to let them die. They created Creole culture, the most original thing this continent has ever produced, a tradition that belongs to no single origin because it was forged from every one of them. The free people of color in antebellum New Orleans built schools, businesses, and a literary tradition in French while the rest of the South denied Black people the right to read. Their descendants are still here, still fighting, and still carrying this city.

The Irish came by sea when the famine took their land. The Acadians came when the British expelled them from Nova Scotia in 1755, the Grand Dérangement, scattering a French Catholic people across the Atlantic. Many found their way to the bayous of southern Louisiana and became the Cajuns, carrying their language and their music and their faith into a landscape that looked nothing like the one they had lost but that they made their own. The Sicilians came by sea and built the French Market into what it is now. The Vietnamese came when Saigon fell, Catholic fishermen from French Indochina who found a Catholic port city with a Gulf full of shrimp, refugees from another French civil law jurisdiction who recognized something in this city that the rest of America could not see. After Katrina they rebuilt their neighborhood in New Orleans East faster than almost anyone, organized through their parish church, Mary Queen of Vietnam, clearing their own lots and reopening while the rest of the city was still arguing about permits. Pirates. People who did not wait for permission. And from further still, from Punjab and Gujarat and Kerala and every corner of the subcontinent, families came carrying traditions older than any code on this continent, and Louisiana did what Louisiana does: it took them in, gave them a table, and made room.

And before all of them, the ones who were already here. The Chitimacha, the Choctaw, the Houma, the Tunica-Biloxi, the Coushatta, the Caddo, the Atakapa-Ishak, and the others whose names survive in the words we use without thinking: Opelousas, Natchitoches, Atchafalaya, Pontchartrain. The ones who did not cross any water because this was the water. The ones whose promised land was not reached but taken. Their fight for justice is the one that began first and has not ended, and any bridge we build must reach that shore too.

Now the shelter itself is disappearing. The mouth of the Mississippi, the voice of this whole river system, has lost two thousand square miles of marsh and coastline since the 1930s, and a football field of land vanishes every hundred minutes. The billions it will take to hold the delta together are not secured, and the restoration projects keep getting canceled. So the pirates need to find a way to keep the shelter standing, or think creatively about what comes next: build levees and diversions on the scale of the Dutch, who put Amsterdam below sea level and made it thrive, or reimagine the whole relationship between the city and the Gulf. This is what pirates have always been good at, after all, looking at a situation that was not designed for them and engineering a way through it anyway. On the field they call it an audible: you read what the defense actually gives you and change the play at the line. The Gulf changes the defense every season.

That is more than resilience, and more than grit. That is faith. And this is the city where poker was born, where French settlers played a card game called poque on the docks in the 1820s and English speakers changed the name, and the game traveled up the Mississippi by riverboat until the whole country was playing it. The river made the game, and the game taught a particular kind of faith: when the river card turns, your whole hand changes. You do not prematurely freeze, and you do not prematurely fold. You play the hand you are dealt with the players at the table. Lâche pas la patate. Advienne que pourra.

Chez nous-autres. There is no place like home. My father immigrated to this country and this state on faith, earned his degrees at Louisiana Tech and Tulane, built his early career across Louisiana, raised his family, and lived the American dream that this place made possible for us. Everything I am begins with what Louisiana gave him. I have been away for a long time, and I am finding my way back.

Our intention is to headquarter Bonne Foi in New Orleans, with a presence on the West Coast and wherever else the work requires. This is not an arrival but a return, and a return carries obligations. The lawyers, the legal aid organizations, the advocates, and the communities that have held this ground have been doing this work with more heart than resources for a long time. We are not here to save anyone or to second-guess the people who never left. We are here to contribute what we carry: an inventor's talent, an infrastructure instinct, and the same creative, non-conformist, refuse-to-wait-for-permission spirit that built this city and this state in the first place. A collaborator, not a corrective. An extra set of hands with a pirate's disregard for the way things have always been done.

My father spent decades of his early career working on the electrical infrastructure that powered the Deep South and the Gulf South. Louisiana Power and Light, NOPSI, and Entergy gave him his start. He built transmission and distribution systems and the large substations that are the backbone of the electrical grid, the ones that step the voltage down and send the power where it needs to go. Substations last forty to sixty years or more, and I believe that many of the ones he helped build are still in service, still transforming voltage, still keeping the lights on. It is with that spark that I am personally ignited to follow in his footsteps over five decades later, building a different kind of infrastructure for the same region, one that connects people to the help they need the way his connected them to the power they could not do without.

I have always found this city, and this state, sovereign, and singular, and holy.

That table, the one that always has room, the one where we eat together, was my father’s long before it was mine. He was raised to know the divine not as something kept in a building but as something you carry and give away; that service (seva) is the truest prayer; that you answer suffering by setting a longer table, never a higher wall. His love, his generosity, his spirit are the principles he has left behind, and they live now in all of us, in everyone this bridge will ever carry across.

À la grâce de Dieu.