By John Sexton

As I have noted earlier, from the beginning America had been a society based on law and forged by lawyers; for us, the law has been the great arbiter and the principal means by which we have been able to knit one nation out of a people whose dominant characteristic always has been diversity. Just as the law has been the means for founding, defining, preserving, reforming and democratizing a united America, America?s lawyers have been charged with setting the nation?s values. Unlike other countries, America has no unifying religion or ethnicity; our principle of unification is law.

Unfortunately, there are demagogues who would trash the law and its role to advance their own agendas. An example is a book, The Language of the 21st Century by the Luntz Research Companies, which is now being distributed in political circles. After asserting that ?in the upcoming battle, words will matter? and noting that words ?can declare war? and ?inflame,? the author goes on to say ?it?s almost impossible to go too far when it comes to demonizing lawyers? (italics in the original). In a full chapter devoted to poll data and the resulting strategies for attacking lawyers and our legal system, this political guidebook advises: ?Few classes of Americans are more reviled by the general public than attorneys, and you should tap into people?s anger and frustration with practitioners of law.? It concludes: ?Attacking lawyers is admittedly a cheap applause line (right up there with announcing your birthday, anniversary or wedding), but it works;? so, ?don?t hesitate to resort to ridicule when making your points.? These passages give some sense of the demagoguery that our society will be forced to endure in the coming years.

Of course, this attack on lawyers is just another, more general version of the attack on judges and the notion of an independent (and sometimes antimajoritarian!) judiciary. And these attacks are parts of a larger phenomenon: the increasing tendency of our society to devalue its institutions (whether its government, its universities, or its churches) and to desiccate those who seek to serve those institutions. We are in a time where all too frequently (if not almost always) sloganizing and personal attacks are preferred to engagement on the substance of even (perhaps especially) the most complicated issues; the Luntz book is simply an exhibit of that tendency.

Whatever the scope or source of the current vilification of law and lawyers, we in the academy must take cognizance of it?and react to it aggressively. Law schools and legal educators will not reverse these trends by themselves; but the trends must be reversed, and we must be part of the process that reverses them. The law and legal practice are the objects of our research, and our graduates define the realities of practice. If attorneys (and society in general) have lost the sense of the special role of lawyers, we in legal education must discover why that has happened, and what can be done about it. Academic lawyers are in a special position to provide an objective view of such matters, and we must embrace our responsibility to do so.

The process of discovery and prescription will be a long and a complex one. Lawyers, like most of us, are human beings, not gods; they make mistakes; there have been abuses?serious abuses. But, the operation of the law and lawyers is not captured by the O.J. trial or ?Law and Order.? For every frivolous lawsuit, there are ten which vindicate some important principle or right; for every lawyer who betrays his or her trust, there are ten who serve well; and, there are many, many ?hero? lawyers. Still, it would be wrong to rest on the nobility of law and lawyers; something is amiss, and we must discern a way to make things better.

In the short run, however, we must stand vigorously against those demagogues who would abuse the law and lawyers to advance their agenda. It is one thing to recognize that our legal system can and should be improved, and that we must reawaken the sense of the special role of lawyers. It is quite another thing?and quite deplorable?to undermine the foundation of our society and to engage in analysis by lawyer jokes.

?Liberty, Justice, Equality; without lawyers, they are just words.? Those words transmit an essential truth; and, we in the academy must take it upon ourselves to teach that truth far and wide.

* This article appeared in the November 1997 AALS Newsletter