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Some critics suggest that lawyers write laws in undecipherable language to guarantee employment for future generations of lawyers, who will be the only people capable of understanding them. There may be some truth in that, but the fact is that a complex society tends to need complex laws —ones that will effectively keep factories from polluting rivers, employers from discriminating against minorities, meat packers from stuffing sausages with sawdust. Besides, as Stanford Law Professor John Kaplan points out, "If you use an old form, something that is hard to read and is really antiquated, the chances are that it has already been interpreted by a court or two. You have legal decisions as to what precisely the words mean."

Still, the mumbo jumbo can intimidate and irritate the layman. Further resentment stems from the ability of excellent lawyers to muddle and obfuscate. Says Button: "Lawyers are paid to complicate, to keep a dispute alive, to make everything technical." The Washington, D.C., firm of Covington & Burling, for example, once delayed for twelve years a Food and Brug Administration ruling on the labeling of peanut butter jars. Said one Covington lawyer: "Certainly, there's something suspicious about a 24,000-page hearing transcript and close to 75,000 pages of documents on a case involving peanut butter." As Humorist Art Buchwald put it in a recent column: "It isn't the bad lawyers who are screwing up the justice system in this country—it's the good lawyers ... If you have two competent lawyers on opposite sides, a trial that should take three days could easily last six months."

Perhaps what is most grating, ultimately, is the indispensability of lawyers in modern society: their skill at decoding the laws written by Congressmen-lawyers or their lawyer aides, at interpreting the regulations promulgated by bureaucrat-lawyers, at helping influence the decisions made by politician-lawyers. The swashbuckling entrepreneur may not be a vanished species, but he is an endangered one; and in a complex, technological society he may not get very far without a secular priest, his lawyer, to minister to him. "I can't believe the change," says Atlanta Attorney Sidney O. Smith, recently retired from the federal bench. "Today a businessman cannot function without an attorney."

At the heart of Anglo-American jurisprudence is the adversary system, a device by which justice and truth are to emerge from the clash between two opposing viewpoints. "We boast about it, but it's a very mischievous system designed not to achieve but to frustrate the truth," declares New York City Lawyer Abraham Pomerantz. "Each side pulls out the facts that help and ignores those that don't. Out of that come confusion and distortion, and the cleverer guy wins." The system also suffers from disparity among lawyers. Some are superior, and others are what U.S. Judge David Bazelon labels "walking violations of the Sixth Amendment" (which guarantees the right to counsel). As Bar Critic Jerold S. Auerbach put it, "Equal justice under law" all too often means "unequal justice under lawyers."