Hating lawyers is old, it's nothing to do with American conditiosn in particular. I think it derives from a number of factors:
1) legal disputes are unpleasant, 2) there loser always hates his lawyer, whose fault it must have been because his cause was just, and 3) the winner hates his lawyer because the lawyer didn't get him everything he wants and anyway, why should the winner have to pay his lawyer to vindicate his rights? 4)Besides, lawyers are insincere, they will say anything, tell any lie, defend any vile cause, if only they are paid enough, 6) Anyway, lawyers are jsut tools of the rich (or, if you are rich, parasites and tools of the poor, who want to sue you for no good raeson) 5) Law is just pettifoggery put up by lawyers as part of a self-full employment plan, because reasonable people can resolve their disputes without all that hairsplitting, or 6) It's a distraction from whatever real solutions we should be proposing for our problems
Therefore, lawyers are scum, evil bags of excrement, untrustworthy liars, and should all be shot.
Most of these attitudes showed up here, and probably nothing can be done about it, because mine is a profession people love to hate. I suppose I shouldn't mind. I used to be a philosophy professor, which people despised as irrelevant. I thought that went out with the Greeks and the Romans, someone told me. None of this looks like materialist analysis of the place of lawyers in capitalist society, but that would be too much to ask, I guess.
I think law is a job. Most lawyers are no more or less crooked or deceitful than anyone else, and most of them have as much integrity as most people, which means that they will not lie or knowingly defend what they believe to be the worse rather than the better cause. Naturally their idea of what causes are OK is shaped by their interests, but that's just life. Also any lawyer will have to sometimes do things that she has reservations about--when I worked for a union, I had to defend the union against lawsuits by disgruntled workers in the context of defending a labor-management cooperatioon plan of a sort I dispise. I could live with that in order to do work defending the union against the bosses. Every job has its compromises.
In my personal experience, the lawyers I have known are far better people, morally, than professors--and for what it worth, Sam, I always hated academics, even when I was one, and had no views about lawyers in those days. If anyone wants to start an "academics are scum" thread, count me in. As Sonny Boy Williamson used to say, Don't start me talkin', I'll tell everything I know.
If there is a dirty professional secret it is not that most lawyers are liars but that most of them are barely competent, if they are that good. (As someone who reads their briefs for a judge and sees them argue day in and day out, I am in a position to know.) The level of legal incompetence is just staggering. But law is probably not much different from most professions in that regard, including academic philosophy. It's just that it actually matters in law, where people's money or freedom is at stake.
There are lawyers of different types, obviously. A few of them are big corporate lawyers who make big bucks defending large corporations against lawsuits by people those corporations have victimized. Nathan is at Yale, where everyone who doesn't aspire to be a law professor aspires to be a partner at Kirkland & Ellis. That color his view of the profession.
I was at Ohio State, a humbler school where most of my classmates went into smallish firms making the wheels of small and medium-sized businesses work, helping buy and sell real estate, write contracts, and that sort of thing. Most of them had no heroic conception of law, but insofar as they are mostly honest and fairly competent (certainly well-trained--better, I think, than Nathan will be, because Ohio State has a very vocational conception of itself), whereas Yale is very theoretical--I find I learned a lot more law and less theory than other clerks who went to fancier schools), I think that they will do more good than harm.
Moreover, perhaps because I don't think that markets and profits are evil or unnecessary, I don't share the view of whatever lawyer it was on this list who thought that disclosure work of the sort that he did to keep the markets going is parasitical or contemptible. Kunstler, whom I admire for his political activism and his service as a people's lawyer, may have thoughts so, but K had a strong streak of infantile leftism. Now I have a rather different view of management-side labor lawyers or lawyers who do environmental defense work, but my point is that even big time corporate law need not be an immoral choice. Here as elsewhere one needs to draw lines.
Likewise with criminal prosecution: would you have the state's attorneys and US attorneys all be right wing creeps? And for all the appalling defects of the criminal justice system, it would be a terrible mistake to imagine that most criminals are innocent victims of racist frameups or somewhat misguided revolutionaries.
Lawyers do play a role in our society of greasing the wheels of commerce, supprting the system by policing the bounds of property relations, providing ideologiacl legitimation by ging some individuals and groups limited recourse agaisnt the excesses of the system or individual misconduct. They also support the state, whether as officers of the court or as participants and sometimes (like me) employees of the state. That gives them a reformist and meliorist ideology--at best.
But of course all this is true with changes of any professional group in our society. The role of humanities professors is to churn out more or less skilled labor power appropriately disciplined, and even radical professors serve the ideological functuon of showing that the system can tolerate dissent (up to a point, as I found out). You might as well hate any group or profession that makes al iving and has any choice in the matter as hate lawyers because they have not organized the revolution and are not likely to.
So, that's my last say on the matter.
Justin Schwartz, Esq.