The Lost Lawyer: Failing Ideals of the Legal Profession - Hardcover

Kronman, Anthony

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674539265 ISBN 13: 9780674539266

Publisher: Belknap Press, 1993

Synopsis

Anthony Kronman describes a spiritual crisis affecting the American legal profession, and attributes it to the collapse of what he calls the ideal of the lawyer-statesman: a set of values that prizes good judgment above technical competence and encourages a public-spirited devotion to the law.

For nearly two centuries, Kronman argues, the aspirations of American lawyers were shaped by their allegiance to a distinctive ideal of professional excellence. In the last generation, however, this ideal has failed, undermining the identity of lawyers as a group and making it unclear to those in the profession what it means for them personally to have chosen a life in the law.

A variety of factors have contributed to the declining prestige of prudence and public-spiritedness within the legal profession. Partly, Kronman asserts, it is the result of the triumph, in legal thought, of a counterideal that denigrates the importance of wisdom and character as professional virtues. Partly, it is due to an array of institutional forces, including the explosive growth of the country's leading law firms and the bureaucratization of our courts. The Lost Lawyer examines each of these developments and illuminates their common tendency to compromise the values from which the ideal of the lawyer-statesman draws strength. It is the most important critique of the American legal profession in some time, and an an enduring restatement of its ideals.

About this title

About the Author

Anthony T. Kronman is Dean of the Law School, Yale University.

From Library Journal

America's lawyers are viewed with ambivalence. The best, perhaps embodied by Atticus Finch in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird , combine judgment and principle with something of the scholar's love of the pursuit of truth. Yet Dan Quayle questions lawyers' basic honesty and trustworthiness at the annual American Bar Association convention. Kronman (law, Yale Univ.) worries about the decline of the "lawyer-statesman," that lawyer who possesses more than just technical proficiency in legal persuasion. Kronman sees Abraham Lincoln and, more recently, the late Chief Justice Earl Warren as just such "lawyer-statesmen." Both possessed those traits of prudence, wisdom, and judgment that counted far more than legal expertise. Their absence underlies the crisis facing the American legal profession. This is an interesting book, but it won't change many of the well-entrenched opinions about lawyers. For academic and larger public library legal collections.
- Jerry E. Stephens, U.S. Court of Appeals Lib., Oklahoma City
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0674539265
• ISBN 13: 9780674539266
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 440