No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Elite Privilege and Public Interest Lawyering
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 October 2011
Extract
I was delighted to receive David Wilkins's kind comments about my article. Wilkins provides a cogent and pithy analysis of the relationship between the public interest and elite corporate bars. In so doing, he uses my article as a springboard for proposing a thesis more ambitious and general than mine, involving several propositions concerning what he terms the “odd alliance” and “enduring relationship” between elite corporate and public interest lawyers. Wilkins states that this alliance is related to: (1) the similar class origins of these two kinds of lawyers; (2) public interest lawyers' tendency to target defendants who do not threaten the interests of corporate lawyers' powerful clients; and (3) the class interests of the elite bar in bolstering an image of the legal profession as devoted to the pursuit of justice. On all of these topics, I have many points of agreement with Wilkins. I do, however, perceive some differences, which I will very briefly sketch in the limited space allotted me here.
- Type
- Forum: Response
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2002
References
1. See Wilkins, David B., “Class Not Race in Legal Ethics: Or Why Hierarchy Makes Strange Bedfellows,” Law and History Review 20 (2002): 147–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2. Carle, Susan D., “From Buchanan to Button: Legal Ethics and the NAACP (Part II),” University of Chicago Law School Roundtable 8 (2001): 281–311.Google Scholar
3. I also hasten to add that during the era that was my focus, I do not think there was, by the longest shot, any general professional alliance between the elite bar and the NAACP. As I hope I emphasized sufficiently, only a small band of elite lawyers was involved in the NAACP. The mood of the profession nationally is reflected in the American Bar Association's vote in 1912 to exclude African-Americans from membership, a position that institution did not reverse until the 1940s.
4. Carlin, Jerome E., Lawyers on Their Own (1962; reprint, San Francisco: Austin and Winneld Publishers, 1994).Google Scholar
5. For my somewhat different take on the 1908 canons, see Carle, Susan, “Lawyers' Duty to Do Justice: A New Look at the History of the 1908 Canons,” Law & Social Inquiry 24 (1999): 1, 6–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6. I particularly want to clarify my normative perspective after having had a member of one audience to which I delivered this paper tell me, to my consternation, that he liked my paper because it confirmed for him “everything he hated about the NAACP.” Several other readers have had similar reactions that my argument is that the NAACP was doing something “wrong” by “violating” legal ethics rules. That absolutely is not my intended point.