Justin,
I never said anything about lawyers as people, only as a profession. I actually agree with you that academics probably have a higher percentage of psychotics and petty thugs than law. A lot of lawyers are very pleasant people-- by the nature of their work, they develop good social skills and often care about their clients.
But that says nothing about the social utility of their work. While I won't make a comprehensive analysis, the general reputation of surgeons is that they are a bunch of egotistical, abrasive assholes with god complexes, but (various health care allocation quibbles aside) that still does not cancel the fact that a good surgeon adds tremendously to peoples' quality of life. Maybe if the medical profession institutionally included someone trying to kill you in the operating room, we might have a similar view of the medical profession.
In theoretic economic terms, the law is a "transaction cost" - a dead-loss waste that we try to minimize but a waste by its inherent nature. People intuitively have that sense and have honest suspicions of those who engage in that process, even if they protest that by good performance of their job, they reduce those inevitable transaction costs. But reducing the harm of a social process caused and administered by your profession is just not a recipe for respect.
I agree with you that being at Yale does increase my disrespect for lawyers, since I do see all these nice young people on this treadmill towards doing evil corporate work. And you are correct that the average local practicioner does carpenter-like service for their clients. But that does not save the evaluation of the profession, since it is the corporate law firm partners who have the most respect within the profession, and it is reasonable to evaluate a profession by those whom it lionizes and gives the most compensation. If the "stars" of the profession commit gross evil on the body politic and retain respect within the profession, then the rest of the profession is rightly condemned for guilt by association. If being a corporate lawyer was treated like being a drug or mafia lawyer, then the profession might deserve respect, but corporate partners are given the most prestigious positions in legal conferences, within the ABA and throughout the profession.
And your favorability towards markets is a fairer reason for liking lawyers. Lawyers by their nature are the most direct upholders of capitalism and its legal underpinnings. To the extent one is hostile to those legal underpinnings, the more hostile one will be to lawyers as a profession. True conservatives are very careful not to attack lawyers as a group -- since they love their corporate lawyers -- but only attack "trial lawyers" (i.e. plaintiff-side lawyers). And liberals who want to reform but maintain capitalism also praise those plaintiff-side lawyers, since that is the route to reformed capitalism.
In that sense, favorability or hostility to the law is probably a decent Rorchach test for divisions between left-liberals and socialists.
That all said, I am in law school, so I obviously think legal skills can serve the socialist and progressive movement. But I try to look at it the same way I look at accounting or any other skills. We need left organizers with a wide range of skills, but I hope to keep my self-identification as an activist who has legal skills, not a lawyer who does activism. The difference may be subtle but it should translate to never mistaking a particular legal case for the revolution and always having a focus on spreading my legal skills and knowledge to those without those skills -- the classic mode of any organizer. The basic credo of every organizer is that they should strive to attain their own irrelevance and to the extent that legal knowledge is diffused, that is part of the key role of any radical with legal knowledge.
And to the extent that this legal knowledge is widely understood, then the specific procedural and technical skills of lawyers could be more respected, since this would involve merely specialized skills, not power protected through legal monopoly.
-- Nathan Newman
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of JKSCHW at aol.com
> Sent: Friday, January 07, 2000 10:39 PM
> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Subject: Re: Do lawyers suck?
>
>
> A final word on lawyer bashing, and then I will leave it to those who love
> it.
>
> 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.
>