“You should be a lawyer.”
When I was 7 years old, I took that as a compliment. It said, “You can keep up with the adults around you, you can hold your own (at least for a kid) in the complex discussions going on and perhaps even convince the family to go to Olive Garden for the third time in a row because, come on, the breadsticks alone are enough to satiate and silence you and your three siblings for hours.”
But now that I’m 21 years old, being told I should be a lawyer is tantamount to being told I’m a pain in the ass.
Because as an adult, I learned that no one actually likes lawyers. Being meant for that career field means you are argumentative, stubborn, even conniving; it’s a downright insult.
Clarence Darrow himself, the great paragon of American law, once said, “The trouble with law is lawyers.” And it sort of makes sense; two of the most famous cases in recent history involved the impeachment of President Richard Nixon as well as the acquittal of O.J. Simpson, who recently released a book in which he all but confesses to murdering his wife.
In a country where they help presidents cheat the system and get murderers off the hook, it isn’t hard to see why people hate lawyers.
And hating lawyers isn’t just a national pastime: in “Legal Ethics: A Comparative Study,” Geoffrey C. Hazard explains that people have complained about lawyers since biblical times. The complaints always seem to run along five lines: abuse of legal practice, false documentation, deceiving clients and those less informed about the law, procrastination in work habits and overcharging for services.
To be sure, a quick Google search offers a multitude of blog posts and books with titles like "42 Reasons Why I Hate Lawyers" and “The Terrible Truth About Lawyers” reviling and explicating exactly why lawyers are the butts of jokes and the bane of social consciousness.
I have been considering law school since I was 7 years old, when the idea was first planted in my mind. But the scorn with which lawyers are treated in this country has put me off of the career in recent years.
However, recent headlines suggest that it isn’t the lawyers we should hate; it’s the institutions behind them.
Many great legal minds of the past never had to go through the complex process of licensure that the American Bar Association now requires for every practicing lawyer in the country.
It reminds us that men like Franz Kafka and Mahatma Gandhi and Abraham Lincoln, even Geraldo Rivera all bore the title of lawyer, and surely they were decent men, right? (“The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vault” notwithstanding.)
So maybe we’re giving lawyers a bad rep. We forget that not all defense lawyers get the guilty off the hook, not all prosecutors are trying to imprison the innocent and that only a small percentage of lawyers even deal with criminal trials at all.
It’s a classic case of the most basic fallacy, the hasty generalization, combined with a social rhetoric that continued throughout the last two decades so rampantly that our generation now believes lawyers are bad — it’s just one more social prejudice we ascribe to without questioning.
So before you become party to the latest batch of lawyer jokes, I have one final plea for the case of lawyers. Before he was King Leonidas, Gerard Butler was a lawyer, and any profession of the man who took down Xerxes is a profession due of at least a small shred of respect.
Reach the columnist at arimmeli@asu.edu
