The Betrayed Profession: Lawyering at the End of the Twentieth Century - Softcover

Linowitz, The Hon. Sol M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080185329X ISBN 13: 9780801853296

Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996

Synopsis

"A much needed antidote, with its perceptive comments on the decline of the legal profession."--Warren E. Burger, Chief Justice of the United States, 1969-1986

This is the first searching examination of the troubled legal profession to be written by one of the nation's leading lawyers, and in it Sol Linowitz offers guidelines to a renewed professionalism among attorneys. The Betrayed Profession criticizes not the mouthpieces and the ambulance chasers that are the usual targets of public criticism, but the leaders of the bar--the New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., firms that have created a "legal services industry" and turned a public calling into an increasingly narrowed business. Linowitz shows that many lawyers have lost their connection to the tradition that theirs is a public profession--that the lawyer's responsibility is not simply to the client, or to the highest fee obtainable, but to the court. Today, the bar association has become a trade union for lawyers, and the public is the loser. This book is an urgent call to action that neither the legal profession nor the public it is meant to serve can afford to ignore.

About this title

About the Author

Sol M. Linowitz, ambassador to the Organization of American States under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, negotiated the Panama Canal Treaties under President Carter. He was also President Carter's representative to the Middle East peace talks. Until 1994, he practiced law in Washington, D.C. Martin Mayer is the author of many books, including Nightmare on Wall Street, The Greatest-Ever Bank Robbery, and The Bankers. He lives in Washington, D.C.

From Kirkus Reviews

Overlong and overly impressionistic breast-beating from one of the elder statesmen of the American bar with help from Mayer (The Greatest Ever Bank Robbery, 1990). How profound can reader response be to a book that conludes: ``The fault is not in our stars but in ourselves''? Linowitz, former US ambassador and currently senior partner of a noted ``white shoe'' law firm, gave a lawyer-thumping speech at Cornell Law School's centenary celebration. Apparently aided and abetted by several Supreme Court justices who sent admiring notes about the speech, he has here elongated it into a book-length treatment about the decline of standards in the legal profession. His major complaint is that too many lawyers, faced with increased competition and the drive for personal profit, have abdicated their independence--i.e., they are ``afraid to say no'' to clients. This might make a hard-hitting op-ed piece despite the confusing title (``betrayed'' by whom?), but the argument peters out when blown up to over 200 pages, largely on the strength of material that seems more anecdotal than evidentiary. The book has its stranger moments, as when Linowitz lionizes old-line titans like Paul Cravath for their courage to defy their clients while admitting that the doors of the law firms run by Cravath and his peers were shut to Linowitz as a young lawyer because of his ethnic origins. Too often Linowitz's valid reflections (e.g., on the unhealthy change from a long-term lawyer/client relationship to one-shot transaction work) nestle uncomfortably next to pointless or confusing stories (``An ever-increasing number of people no longer admire doctors''). Linowitz's ``solutions''--greater independence, more pro bono work- -are worthy but not exactly cutting-edge stuff. While aware of the temptation to glorify the ``good old days,'' Linowitz is not too successful in avoiding that trap: he complains of the ``forced retirement of senior partners `who had the wisdom and leisure to serve as mentors.' '' A real ho-hum. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 080185329X
• ISBN 13: 9780801853296
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288