Who are the lawyers?
Lawyers come in varying shapes and sizes. We may have a distorted image of lawyers, shaped by the hunks and hotties of TV dramas and Hollywood films. Distorted, but not completely false.
Dispensing equal parts office sex and moral conundrums, shows like LA Law and The Practice have done a respectable job of teaching academic legal ethics to television viewers, because many of their plots come straight from actual cases passed along to the scriptwriters by lawyer-consultants. I expect that millions of people now know some fine points about the attorney-client privilege because they watch television. The office sex is probably exaggerated (I wouldn’t know), and the climactic courtroom face-offs are absurd. For that matter, real-life clients of urban law firms are mostly businesses, not the individual clients of the TV shows. Basically, though, the shows do a reasonable job of dramatizing law firms and lawyers who are trying to do the right thing, with a few human, all-too-human lapses, in a hard-bitten world. From my vantage point as a law teacher, they are often lawyers I can imagine my students becoming, facing dilemmas straight out of the cases in my ethics textbook. But they bear almost no resemblance to Cyril Gross, or to most other lawyers I know.We have other images of lawyers as well. There are the flamboyant criminal defense lawyers like Johnnie Cochran, and the rich Southern plaintiffs’ lawyers in their custom-made suits, cowboy boots, and private jets - veteran villains of a thousand lawyer-bashing Wall Street Journal editorials. And their poorer cousins trolling for torts on late-night television, with phony-looking shelves of law books as the backdrop; and grandstanding US Attorneys announcing high-profile arrests. Popular culture does not, I think, offer a similarly well-etched stereotype of business lawyers in corporate counsels’ offices and high-end law firms.
Their practice is too unfamiliar, too invisible, and, for most people, too anesthetic to give rise to stereotypes. Neither do we know the corporate defense bar, except in occasional Hollywood movies that caricature them as robotic teams of interchangeable creeps in suits.These different kinds of lawyers - visible and invisible, fictional, semi- fictional, and real - seem to have nothing much in common; and it has become a truism among legal sociologists and commentators that today we have many bars, not one bar, segmented by subspecialty and by the wealth and class of their clients.
In fact, however, all these lawyers have a good deal in common. They all went to law school, where they studied nearly identical basic curricula from a more or less uniform set of textbooks. As theorist Melvin Eisenberg observes, these textbooks teach “national law” - a construct that isn’t really the law of any specific jurisdiction, but rather combines representative principles into a kind of legal Esperanto that provides what real Esperanto was supposed to: a common language.[1] All the lawyers learn the same basic techniques of reading legal texts, what law professors call “thinking like a lawyer.” All are taught by professors who are, increasingly, drawn from national law schools and who teach national law in roughly the same way. All the lawyers in every state take the same state bar examination, and many states’ bar exams test on “national law” as well as the state’s specific variant of it. Most states require the same ethics exam (the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination), which tests national law. And so, beneath their diversity, the lawyers inhabit a single, profession-wide interpretive community, with the same overall understanding of what makes law law. This fact allows us to speak coherently of a single legal profession. To an important extent, the uniformity of legal training is an indispensable material condition for maintaining the rule of law.