I know, I know. I’m an idiot for even trying to defend lawyers, but I’m going to do so any way. After all, isn’t that what law school teaches you to do, defend people? What? It teaches you to make a shitload of money through frivolous cases? Damn, I wish I had paid attention.
Back to the point . . .
I was talking with my father recently about how lawyers are over-represented in government, specifically the House and Senate. He asked what I thought about this. I told him that it made sense and that Alexis de Tocqueville saw this coming and wrote about it in his book Democracy in America way back in the day. My belief is that the prominence of attorneys in government is the result of natural market forces. Attorneys are engaged in the business of law, statutory interpretation and statutory construction, which is what Senators and Congressmen do for a living. It only makes sense that those who work in the law will eventually start writing the law.
Dad complained that, despite their expertise (he takes issue with the idea that attorneys have expertise in the field that others don’t, and I’ll get to that later on), attorneys have not made a better government and that perhaps the number of attorneys in government should be limited in some fashion to rectify the problem of our broken government. He argued that attorneys, after being in government for too long, just lose touch with the concerns of regular people and that something needs to be done about this. I doubted that this would produce any better level of government and that this is probably something best dealt with through term limits or through limiting the role of lobbyists who press special issues ahead of more pressing concerns like high gas prices, alternative energy, the mortgage problem, etc.
I also countered that attorneys do not always lose touch with “regular people”. After all, the following people have been lawyers and taking them out of government wouldn’t be a good thing (well, Moooog would probably want to ditch most of these guys, but I think it would be a bad idea):
John Edwards
Barack Obama
Joe Biden
John Kerry (I don’t like him, but he did some good work while Lieutenant Governor and a prosecutor to help rape victims, so I’m chucking him in)
Bill Clinton (let me rethink this one . . .)
Hillary Clinton (done a lot of good for poor children who lacked health care)
Fritz Hollings (advocated a campaign to end hunger and did a lot for South Carolina)
Russ Feingold (great advocate for civil liberties)
Have there been bad attorneys in government? Absolutely. We need look no further than Richard Nixon and his entire administration. Then there are people like George Allen, Joseph McCarthy, Lindsay Graham, and Joe Lieberman. Hell, then there are all the segregationist Southern Democrats who were lawyers that were disgraces to their states and to the nation as a whole.
Which is the exception, and which is the rule? Probably neither. I would say that there is no rule, attorneys are either good people or bad people. Whether they do good work or bad work has little, if anything, to do with whether the person is an attorney.
Dad and I kept discussing the issue and he continued to persist with the idea that attorneys just lose touch with people and are over-represented in government and that this results in the exclusion of other people from government, specifically minority groups. I disagreed with this strongly. I argued that this sort of belief is based on erroneous ideas regarding the ethics of lawyers (contradiction in terms?) that are, for the most part, unfair. Sure, there are a lot of jerk attorneys who don’t care about the consequences of what they are doing. The Enron and dotcom lawyers are perfect examples. And that doesn’t even get us to Alberto Gonzales and the rest of the Bush lawyers.
But is that true of the legal profession only? How many unethical accounts, doctors, teachers, and other professionals are there? Is the problem the profession, or is it the people who compose the profession? Are there also not good attorneys? What about attorneys like David Bruck, Judy Clarke, Thurgood Marshall, and Anthony Amsterdam? What about the attorneys of the ACLU who defend our freedoms of speech, press, and assembly? What about the attorneys who brought the habeas challenge on behalf of the Gitmo detainees? What about the attorneys who litigated an end to separate but equal? What about those who battle in courtrooms every day against the death penalty? Should these people be excluded from government because they are lawyers? (again, if you’re Moooog the answer is probably “yes”)
And what is wrong with being a lawyer? Law is, without question, one of the great equalizers of society. It is a place where people of all backgrounds work. It has helped bring members of minority groups and the downtrodden into the highest levels of government and works to undo underrepresentation in government.
John Marshall is the nation’s most prominent Chief Justice, the definer of a nation as one biographer called him. He came from a humble background in what was then a very rural Northern Virginia. What brought him to national prominence? What made him one of the most prominent political figures in the Federalist Party in the late 1790s? The law. The law gave him an opportunity to put his dominating intellect and charming personality to work. The results to this country were manifestly great and are being felt to this day!
What gave Harry Reid, the son of a single mother, the tools he needed to become Senate Majority Leader? The law. All three Hispanic senators currently in the Senate share what professional background? The law. All three have a law degree and were admitted to the bar in their respective states. Carol Mosely Braun was the first, and only as of today, black woman to serve in the Senate. What degree did she receive from the University of Chicago? A law degree.
What put me, a young man from South Carolina who attended South Carolina public schools my entire life, in a class with people who went to Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and all manner of prestigious prep schools? The law. The law gave me a chance to prove that I belonged with those of a more privileged background. The law leveled the playing field for me and for all people throughout history.
I know that other professions do the same or similar things, but the law does this as well and it should be honored for it. We shouldn’t condemn the entire profession just because there are bad apples in the bunch. After all, we don’t exclude doctors from service in the Senate just because Bill Frist was a jackass. We don’t prevent teachers from being President just because LBJ mismanaged the war in Vietnam.
Finally, I’m not sure that requiring that all lawyers be out of government, or restricting it to correspond to the percentage of attorneys in the general population, would be a good idea. Lawyers do have some level of expertise in the law. This, at least in theory, would serve them well in a career in government. While it is true that lawyers have clearly passed a large number of unconstitutional laws, this more likely demonstrates the inherent difficulty in accurately predicting how the Supreme Court will rule (which becomes more difficult each time the Court gets a new member) than it demonstrates a lack of expertise in legal matters. And I would demonstrate how difficult predicting Court decisions can be, but this post is already long enough.
But despite that length, there is a final point that I wish to address. Dad complained that the relative wealth of lawyers is the reason for their natural suitability to the government profession as opposed, I assume, to the nature of their work. Dad theorized that this gave them more free time to pursue political interests. I disagree with this proposition sharply.
First, a great deal of attorneys never struck it rich before going into politics. This would include Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Lindsay Graham, George Allen, and Bill Clinton. Second, a lot of the attorneys who win elections to government positions are prosecutors and are not anywhere near what we think of as wealthy when we think of an attorney. These are people who are not making six figures, they are working as prosecutors or some other government attorney and will be very lucky to reach the $100,000 mark. Heck, principals of school districts can do better than your average state prosecutor. I’m not saying that prosecutors are starving (they aren’t public defenders), but let’s not lump them in with the big firm lawyers. And third, as to free time, the law is a very demanding profession. It eats up a lot of your free time. This is not a profession that will naturally lend itself to having time to run campaigns early on, especially if you work for a firm and are treated as a Step-And-Fetch-It associate or a grunt public defender/prosecutor.
No conclusion, post is too long. Sorry!
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