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Practical Wisdom and Professional Character

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Anthony Kronman
Anthony Kronman
Affiliation:
Law, Yale University
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Extract

I

The existence of the legal profession is something most lawyers take for granted. Lawyers of course do many different things, and lead different sorts of lives, but those who make their living in the law tend to assume, without much reflection, that they have a bond or association of some sort with others who do the same and believe they share something important in common with them. It is not at all clear, however, what this common element is, and the great diversity of tasks that lawyers perform – representing litigants, counseling clients, advising legislators, administering government programs, and deciding cases – can easily make one doubt whether the search for a link leads to anything but empty generalities.

One may, of course, conclude that the main law jobs, as Karl Llewellyn called them, have nothing important in common, and that the legal profession is only a name for a disconnected collection of pursuits with no substance or reality of its own. This is not, however, a very satisfying view, to lawyers at least, and is likely to provoke the quick reply that what lawyers share in common is after all quite easy to discern. All lawyers, regardless of the nature of their work, possess a general knowledge of the law which they have acquired through a specialized program of instruction; laypersons lack such knowledge and it is this, one might argue, which marks the line between those who are lawyers and those who are not and, thus, defines the scope and nature of the profession.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , Autumn 1986 , pp. 203 - 234
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1986

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References

* I would like to thank my colleague Perry Dane for his very helpful comments on an earlier draft.

1 Llewellyn, K., The Normative, The Legal and the Law Jobs: The Job of Juristic Method, 49 Yale L.J. 1355 (1940).Google Scholar

2 S. Huntington, The Soldier and the State 8 (1957).

3 Nicomachean Ethics 1141b1–1142a 30.

4 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Q. 57 Art. 4–5.

5 Kant is in part responsible for this, having used the term prudence to denote enlightened self-interest. “The word prudence is taken in two senses: in the one it may bear the name of knowledge of the world, in the other that of private prudence. The former is a man's ability to influence others so as to use them for his own purposes. The latter is the sagacity to combine all these purposes for his own lasting benefit.” Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals 33 (1873).

6 Hannah Arendt's interpretation of this story is quite interesting. See The Life of the Mind: Volume One, Thinking 82 (1977).

7 Nicomachean Ethics, 1142a 27.

8 Nicomachean Ethics, 1112a 17–1113a 13, 1142a 32–1142b 35; on the translation of bouleusis, see J. Cooper, Reason and Human Good in Aristotle 5–6 (1975).

9 The phrase is Henry James'. See Washington Square 1 (1984).

10 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 130.

11 The section called “The Schematism of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding,” A 137/B 176– A 147/B 187.

12 See J. Bennett, Kant's Analytic 141–152 (1966).

13 Critique of Pure Reason, A 140/B 179.

14 This, of course, is the process that Rawls describes as the movement toward “reflective equilibrium.” See J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice 20 (1971).

15 Holmes, Collected Legal Papers 44 (1921).

16 C. C. Langdell, Remarks to Alumni of Harvard Law School, Law Quarterly Review 123–24 (1887).

17 Terence, The Self-Tormentor, I, 1, 25.