A Nation Under Lost Lawyers: The Legal Profession at the Close of the Twentieth Century: Article: Lawyers in the Mist: The Golden Age of Legal Nostalgia
A Nation Under Lost Lawyers: The Legal Profession at the Close of the Twentieth Century: Article: Lawyers in the Mist: The Golden Age of Legal Nostalgia
How often we hear that the profession is commercialized; that the lawyer of to day does not enjoy the position and influence that belonged to the lawyer of seventy-five or a hundred years ago; that, instead of being an all-around lawyer, one must now be a specialist; that the rules of law are less definite, and the decisions of the courts less certain that they used to be; and that the last thing a lawyer need know, in order to success [sic] under present-day conditions, is the law. ... Contemporary discourse about law practice is laced by a sense of lost virtue and lost amenity and infused with nostalgia for the good old days. ... The decline of law from a noble profession infused with civic virtue to commercialism has been a recurrent theme of professional discourse. Distress about lost virtue has been a constant accompaniment of elite law practice at least since the formation of the large firm a hundred years ago. ... Professor Glendon and Dean Kronman concur that the last twenty-five years or so have witnessed a triple decline: in the judiciary, in the legal academy, and in the practicing bar - particularly the bar's elite large firm sector. ... But the accounts of these observers raise a series of difficult questions: Was the large corporate firm ever the prime carrier of the ideal of public service? Has there really been a decline in the profession's devotion to public service? How much has the mix of business and service motivations changed? Has there been a change in the extent to which corporate litigators play hardball? It is fair to say that once we abandon the essentialist Golden Age/Fallen Age frame, we just don't know.
