Currently in the U.S. House of Represesntatives about 37% of members are lawyers, while in the Senate, the number is 58%. In some ways it seems curious that we allow lawyers to so predominate in our legislatures. After all we make jokes about the life-destroying greed of lawyers. Furthermore, the law is one profession where we expect practitioners to put their personal ethics aside when it comes to who they represent. I remember so vividly a passage in a book from 15-20 years ago which I think was called The Superlawyers, a journalist at a cocktail party asked Philip Morris’ top lawyer if it ever bothered him to represent a company whose products have such a negative effect on society. The lawyer looked at him as if he had asked if he was queer or some other ghastly malapropism. Even mobsters get lawyers in America. In fact unless I’m mistaken a mob lawyer became mayor of Las Vegas.
And it’s not only that lawyers routinely suspend their own personal judgments when they represent clients, there’s another little problem. When lawyers make the law, they tend to make laws that give lawyers work. The tax code, for example, gives a lot of lawyers a lot of work due to its prolix anfractuosity. Routinely, these days, bills like the health care reform are not hundreds but thousands of pages long. This is all wonderful for lawyers, but not so good for us other citizens.
But is it really possible to conceive of legislatures NOT composed of lawyers? Yes, it is. Some city-states in the Renaissance period, for example, actually barred lawyers from taking part in the lawmaking function.
It was a fundamental rule not only in Nuremberg that university trained lawyers could not belong to the city’s legislative bodies…the professional’s counsel was invaluable, but only the layman could make policy – this principle epitomizes the burgher’s deeply rooted distrust of the arcane phrases, the Latin formulae, and the complicated written codes of the lawyer.
Gereald Strauss, Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century
We go to the other extreme. We let the lawyers make and enforce all the laws. Then we complain bitterly about the paperwork, the regulations, the endless litigation. But hey, it’s just lawyers making work. Hence the poll question: