The Different Portraits of A Lawyer

In Charles Dickens' novel, the Pickwick Papers, one of his characters tell that the " impartiality is an ass." In Bleak House, he chronicled the dreary and eonian delays of the case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. Anatole France, the French short story writer, said that: "The law in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges."

In American literature, these themes were reiterated with a vengeance. In the 18th vitamin C, Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac sardonically observed: "God works wonders now and then. Behold! a attorney, an honest man." Brome in the late 19th century said: "The Law and the Lawyer get hold of oftener been the domain of . . . ridicule on the stage than any otherwise syndicate or profession." In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables, Judge Pyncheon, a descendant of one of the accusers of the Salem witches, manipulates the law, "trampling on the weak." In Willa Cather's 1923 novel of frontier life, A Lost Lady, the lawyer, Ivy Peters, is a land-speculating, Indian-cheating, political schemer, who seduces an indigent widow and achieves dominance of a carbon monoxide gas town through his unethical machinations. In Rex Beach's novel of the Klon

Brome, Irving. Law and Lawyers in Literature. Boston: Wm. W. wasted & Sons, 1983.

(2) The friendly and dedicated single practitioner typified by Beigler, Greenwald and mason is no longer characteristic of the bar. Abel says that "as late as the 1950s, nearly all lawyers still were independent private practitioners," solely by 1980, more than two thirds of them worked for large law firms or large corporations. As the solid prosperity of the 1960s false into the tinsel prosperity of the 1980s and the economic insecurities of the downsizing 1990s, more Americans became apprehensive concerning the supposedly benign purposes of large institutions. Lawyers, a favorite scapegoat of public frustrations for centuries, became once again an object of idolatry and envy. Thurow says that "people hate lawyers . . . because they are powerful and because they depend on them.

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Chisolm, Patrick. "The Public on Lawyers-Guilty." McLeans, 11 October 1993, 68-70.

This new portrayal of the lawyer shares some resemblance with the traditional unsavory depiction of the lawyer, unless introduces a distinct contemporary twist. These new anti-heroes exemplify the morality of a "me-first" generation, which distrusts all established institutions and is not bound by any other code than survival and beating the system.

(1) Thurow says that "lawyers were knocked complete their golden throne by Watergate." Thirty-three of them were indicted. Anthony Lewis of the New York generation says that as a result, "lawyers made their names symbols of contempt for law."

Lawyers have always played an influential role in American life, perhaps more so than in any other country. Some, such as Abraham Lincoln, sought to project a confirmatory image of the profession. In turning down a potential client in the 1840s, Lincoln said: "some things legitimately right are not morally right."

Marquand, John P. The modern George Apley. New York: Modern Library, 1936.

Lawyers have had a bad call in recent times. A recent poll
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