Why Do We Love to Hate Lawyers? : Society Would Collapse Without Them--That’s No Joke

“The lawyer has a superior opportunity of becoming a good man. There will always be business. Never stir up litigation.” Abraham Lincoln, who addressed these words to his colleagues, was of course a lawyer, as have been two-thirds of the men we’ve elected President.

Lincoln practiced what he preached. He warned two farmers who came to see him about a boundary dispute that going to court “will cost both of your farms, and will entail an enmity that will last for generations and perhaps lead to murder.” Then he locked them in a room while he went off to lunch.

“Finding ourselves shut up together, we began to laugh,” one of them recounted. “That put us in good humor, and by the time Mr. Lincoln returned, the matter was settled.”

Today, lawyer-bashing is in season, and a troubling aspect of the outbreak of sick jokes is their general lack of good humor. Sticks and stones often follow name-calling, and we should be reminded of history, when certain groups were considered vermin in order to justify their extinction.

Not that lawyers are an endangered species, or need a layman to defend them. I do wonder, though, if attorneys are hated for reasons other than what the jokes imply--not for their alleged greed or survival instincts, but because of their superb adaptability and mental agility. Persuasion by logic and rhetoric, coolness under fire, playing by the rules, respect for precedent--qualities once considered crowning accomplishments of a cultivated mind--are displayed now only in courtrooms, before uncomprehending Philistines.

Though I have not conducted a survey, I notice among my friends that lawyers have more curious hobbies and conversation, broader concerns about public issues, fuller lives than many of the artists, writers or academics I know. As a collector of humor, I appreciate their verbal subtleties derived from the great tradition of legal wit. I would rather read the maxims of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes or the homespun parables of the late Sen. Sam Ervin than hear the old jokes about Hollywood agents that are now recycled against the legal profession.

There are far too many lawyers, we are told, as if this were some natural catastrophe. But we need them, and use them, to live with one another and to avoid one another. From marriage contracts to divorce settlements, from transfer of property, real injury and perceived discrimination to death and taxes, they attend every significant phase of our private lives.

In a society where only specialists understand one another, lawyers have succeeded as adaptive generalists. Because we are cowardly, lawyers are surrogate warriors fighting our battles, and they provide convenient if not always fair targets when they lose for us, as they must, statistically, in 50% of all cases.

But whether they win or lose, we envy the way the legal mind can cut through emotional muddles to achieve a compromise where we have tried and failed. We resent paying the lawyers’ fees to which we had agreed so readily when we were out to get at the other fellow. And, of course, we don’t remember our attorneys’ advising us against litigation, because we need to be locked up, like Lincoln’s farmers, before we listen to reason.

In our petty resentments, we forget the countless good fights that lawyers have helped us all win in the march toward greater equity and justice: the drafting and passing of good legislation, successful prosecution of criminals, acquittal of the unjustly accused. We overlook the jurists jailed for their principles and the judges who are losing their lives in Colombia for our drug habits.

Our modern institutions, government itself, the nonprofit organizations that lobby for change or to enhance the quality of life--these are inconceivable without lawyers, many of whom work at low salary or for free for the public good. (I cannot think of other professionals who do as much work pro bono.) As Adlai Stevenson once quipped to John F. Kennedy, who kept raiding Stevenson’s office to staff his Administration: “I regret that I have but one law firm to give to my country.”

The defense rests.