Those

(2 of 10)

The U.S., as befits a society of laws, has always been a litigious land. But the past quarter-century has brought a particularly explosive burst of growth in the legal industry. Since the mid-1950s the courts have discovered a spate of new constitutional rights, protections and entitlements for whole groups of people—for example, disenfranchised voters, women, Latins, prisoners, children, mental patients. Countless others, emboldened by seven-figure awards in personal injury suits, have gone to court in quest of what San Francisco Defense Lawyer Scott Conley sardonically calls the "pot of gold at the end of every whiplash." At the same time, legislative bodies of every size across America have been spewing forth new laws at a prodigious rate, more than 100,000 in some years; as it happens, more than half of the members of Congress and one-fifth of the state legislators are lawyers. Federal agencies, meantime, are generating an additional 35,000 or more new regulations every year. These developments have brought about a virtual revolution in American society: an all-pervasive invasion by courts, laws and administrative agencies into areas that had previously been ruled by custom, practice or plain old-fashioned private accommodation.

It is undeniably a revolution that has done much good for all kinds and conditions of Americans. But the beneficiaries in a different sense have been its architects: lawyers. In the past 15 years, the number of U.S. lawyers has increased from 296,000 to 462,000. Law school enrollments have more than doubled in the same period, from 54,000 to 126,000. Every year more than 30,000 new attorneys are pumped into the job market. Says somebody who ought to know, U.S. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger: "We may well be on our way to a society overrun by hordes of lawyers, hungry as locusts, and brigades of judges in numbers never before contemplated."

Burger's blast is hyperbolic fire for effect, but there is real and widespread cause for concern in the orgiastic growth of laws and lawyers. Says Laurence Silberman, a former U.S. Deputy Attorney General who is now counsel to the Wall Street law firm Dewey Ballantine: "The legal process, because of its unbridled growth, has become a cancer which threatens the vitality of our forms of capitalism and democracy." Others wonder whether the rule of law will prevail in the U.S., or the rule of lawyers.

Attorneys, in short, are more numerous than ever in the nation's history, and in many ways more powerful. Their increase in density, however, has not been accompanied by a proportionate increase in mass affection. To be sure, lawyers have never been terribly popular, particularly among philosophers and writers. Plato spoke of their "small and unrighteous" souls, and Keats said: "I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters." Thomas More left lawyers out of his Utopia, and Shakespeare made his feelings known in that famous line from Henry VI, Part II: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."