Excerpt from “Woe unto you lawyers“, written in 1939 by the late Fred Rodell, Professor of Law, Yale University.
It is the lawyers who run our civilization for us – our governments, our business, our private lives. Most legislators are lawyers; they make our laws. Most presidents, governors, commissioners, along with their advisers and brain-trusters are lawyers; they administer our laws. All the judges are lawyers; they interpret and enforce our laws. There is no separation of powers where the lawyers are concerned. There is only a concentration of all government power – in the lawyers. As the schoolboy put it, ours is “a government of lawyers, not of men.”
It is not the businessmen, no matter how big, who run our economic world. Again it is the lawyers, the lawyers who “advise” and direct every time a company is formed, every time a bond or a share of stock is issued, almost every time material is to be bought or goods to be sold, every time a deal is made. The whole elaborate structure of industry and finance is a lawyer-made house. We all live in it, but the lawyers run it.
And in our private lives, we cannot buy a home or rent an apartment, we cannot get married or try to get divorced, we cannot die and leave our property to our children without calling on the lawyers to guide us. To guide us, incidentally, through a maze of confusing gestures and formalities that lawyers have created.
And rebuttal by Ken Vinson:
If pressed to name a political elite in this country, no group fits better into that category than those learned in The Law. And what better objects of resentment than those who use their clever way with words to run the big political show. So it is that even middle-class parents with little affection for the legal clan struggle with whether to send their offspring to law school, afraid that otherwise they are sending their young out into the world defenseless…
That modern lawyers are a tad too money-mad is born out by a billable-hour corporate law firm culture that led in one extreme instance to an associate’s billing a client for a “legitimate” twenty-seven-hour day. It seems the associate-soon-to-be-partner worked twenty-four hours around the (East Coast) clock, then hopped a flight from New York to California and billed for an extra three hours of in-flight paperwork.[19] Of course, being high-flying legal monopolists whose high fees close the door to legal services for most Americans is no way to win friends or rise in the polls. Shakespeare was not alone in thinking that lawyers use their magic with language to help the powerful stay in power, and that to “kill all the lawyers”[20] is a logical if impolite way to alter an inconvenient status quo. Law students in their first year of study are shocked to learn that The Law is not so much holy writ as it is an obscure alien tongue useful in shaping legal arguments in a form suitable for selling to either side in a lawsuit. Legal novices are taken aback by The Law’s ambiguity and adaptable nature even though there has been fair warning by, among others, Charles Dickens…
Critics such as Fred Rodell are a valuable public resource. Just as the press aspires to expose the failings of our governors and thereby guard the political health of the county, so do those who track and reveal The Law’s semi-hidden operations aspire to keep legal people, well, semi-honest and semi-public-spirited. Lawyers, like all us sinners, need all the help they can get in rising above avarice, vanity, and hypocrisy. Lawyers, remember, must deal with clients anxious to escape their fair share of taxes, to soak McDonald’s for selling scalding-hot coffee, to avoid alimony and child support, to win an acquittal for crime, to gain an advantage by cleverly worded contract, and to delay justice by clogging the courts with pettifoggery. If clients were angels, perhaps lawyers could wear halos too.
