Alexis de Tocqueville's Observations on Attorneys
I thought this excerpt from Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America to be interesting. I find it fascinating because it was a cultural observation by Tocqueville of the barristers in Jacksonian America. He describes lawyers as a conservative force to check "the democratic element" and populist "vices." Nowadays, with the ABA, ACLU, the National Lawyer's Guild, and other unaffiliated social radicals behind the bar, it seems as though the legal profession in general is more apt to stoke the flames of populist vices, and accentuate "the vices inherent in popular government" rather than "neutralize" them. Simply put, the bar is often more an engine for social radicalism than a barrier to it. It's my observation that the sober-minded classical liberal barristers who esteem the rule of law are few and far between these days. Now it's a profession of hucksters and demagogues by and large, but at least that gives the good lawyers a reason to fight.
Granted, an attorney friend of mine offered his perspective, and says to some extent Tocqueville's observation still holds true. Perhaps he is right.
Alexis de Tocqueville writes:
Granted, an attorney friend of mine offered his perspective, and says to some extent Tocqueville's observation still holds true. Perhaps he is right.
Alexis de Tocqueville writes:
In America there are no nobles or literary men, and the people are apt to mistrust the wealthy; lawyers consequently form the highest political class and the most cultivated portion of society. They have therefore nothing to gain by innovation, which adds a conservative interest to their natural taste for public order. If I were asked where I place the American aristocracy, I should reply without hesitation that it is not among the rich, who are united by no common tie, but that it occupies the judicial bench and the bar.
The more we reflect upon all that occurs in the United States the more we shall be persuaded that the lawyers, as a body, form the most powerful, if not the only, counterpoise to the democratic element. In that country we easily perceive how the legal profession is qualified by its attributes, and even by its faults, to neutralize the vices inherent in popular government. When the American people are intoxicated by passion or carried away by the impetuosity of their ideas, they are checked and stopped by the almost invisible influence of their legal counselors. These secretly oppose their aristocratic propensities to the nation's democratic instincts, their superstitious attachment to what is old to its love of novelty, their narrow views to its immense designs, and their habitual procrastination to its ardent impatience.
The courts of justice are the visible organs by which the legal profession is enabled to control the democracy. The judge is a lawyer who, independently of the taste for regularity and order that he has contracted in the study of law, derives an additional love of stability from the inalienability of his own functions. His legal attainments have already raised him to a distinguished rank among his fellows; his political power completes the distinction of his station and gives him the instincts of the privileged classes.
