The Lawyer in Politics

Title

The Lawyer in Politics

Creator

Wilson, Woodrow, 1856-1924

Identifier

WWP20687

Date

1911 July 12

Description

Woodrow Wilson speaks to the Kentucky Bar Association about the definition of a lawyer.

Source

Cary T. Grayson Papers, Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library, Staunton, Virginia

Language

English

Text

[Address of Hon. Woodrow Wilson, governor of New Jersey, before the Kentucky Bar Association, Lexington, Ky., July 12, 1911.]

Mr. President, Ladies, and Gentlemen: The lawyer is, by very definition, an expert in the law; and society lives by law. Without it its life is vague, inchoate, disordered, vexed with a hopeless instability. At every turn of its experience society tries to express its life, therefore, in law—to make the rules of its action universal and imperative. This is the whole process of politics. Politics is the struggle for law, for an institutional expression of the changing life of society.

Of course, this is the deeper view of politics. It is not the view of the mere party man or of the professional politician. He thinks chiefly, no doubt, of the offices and their emoluments; of the tenure of power; of the choice of policy from day to day in the administration of the various departments of government; of the hundred advantages, both personal and partisan, which can be obtained in a successful contest for the control of the instruments of politics; but even he can not escape the deeper view at last. He must express the policy of his party or the advantage gained by his occupation of office in statutes, in rules of law, imposed in the interest of some class or group, if not in the interest of society at large. He is really, in the last analysis, struggling to control law and the development and use of institutions. He needs as much as the statesman does the assistance of the legal expert, the skill of the technical guide; the lawyer must be at his elbow to see that he plays the game according to the nominal rules.

The lawyer, therefore, has always been indispensable, whether he merely guided the leaders or was himself the leader, and nowhere has the lawyer played a more prominent part in politics than in England and America, where the rules of law have always been the chief instruments of contest and regulation, of liberty and efficient organization, and the chief means of lifting society from one stage to the next of its slow development.

The lawyer’s ideal part in this unending struggle is easy to conceive. There is long experience stored up in the history of law. He, above all other men, should have a quick perception of what is feasible, of the new things that will fit into the old, of the experiences which should be heeded, the wrongs that should be remedied, and the rights that should be more completely realized. He knows out of his own practice how pitiful, oftentimes, against how many obstacles, amidst how many impediments, often interposed by the law itself, sometimes interposed by the ignorance of society or by the malevolence of designing men, the men about him make their daily effort to live free from the unnecessary interference or the selfish stupidity or the organized opposition of their neighbors and rivals. He knows what forces gather and work their will in the field of industry, of commerce, of all enterprise. He, if any man, knows where justice breaks down, where law needs amplification or amendment or radical change, what the alterations are that must be effected before the right will come into action easily and certainly and with genuine energy. He should at every turn be the mediator between groups of men, between all contending and contesting interests. He should show how differences are to be moderated, and antagonisms adjusted and society given peace and ease of movement.

He can play this ideal part, however, only if he has the right insight and sympathy. If he regards his practice as a mere means of livelihood, if he is satisfied to put his expert advice at the service of any interest or enterprise, if he does not regard himself as an officer of the State, but only as an agent of private interest, if, above all, he does not really see the wrongs that are accumulating, the mischief that is being wrought, the hearts that are being broken and the lives that are being wrecked, the hopes that are being snuffed out and the energies that are being sapped, he can not play the part of guide or moderator or adviser in the large sense that will make him a statesman and a benefactor.

It is a hard thing to exact of him, no doubt, that he should have a nonprofessional attitude toward law, that he should be more constantly conscious of his duties as a citizen than of his interests as a practitioner, but nothing less than that will fit him to play the really great rôle intended for his profession in the great plot of affairs. He must breed himself in the true philosophy of his calling. It is his duty to see from the point of view of all sorts and conditions of men, of the men whom he is not directly serving as well as of those whom he is directly serving.

This is a matter of character, of disposition, and of training outside the schools of law, in the broader schools of duty and of citizenship and of patriotism. It is a great conception when once a lawyer has filled himself with it. It lifts him oftentimes to a very high place of vision and of inspiration. It makes of him the custodian of the honor and integrity of a great social order, an instrument of humanity, because an instrument of justice and fair dealing and of all those right adjustments of life that make the world fit to live in.

If I contrast with this ideal conception of the function of the lawyer in society what I may be excused for calling his actual rôle in the struggle for law and progress and the renovation of affairs, I hope that I will not be interpreted as suggesting a view of our great profession which is in any wise touched with cynicism or even with the spirit of harsh criticism. The facts do not justify a cynical view of the profession or even a fear that it may be permanently losing the spirit which has ruled the action of the greater members of the bar and of the immortal judges who have presided at the birth and given strength and fiber to the growth and liberty and human right. I wish to submit what I have to say in all fairness and without color even of discouragement.

The truth is that the technical training of the modern American lawyer, his professional prepossessions and his business involvements, impose limitations upon him and subject him to temptations which seriously stand in the way of his rendering the ideal service to society which is demanded by the true standards and canons of his profession. Modern business, in particular, with its huge and complicated processes, has tended to subordinate him, to make of him a servant, an instrument instead of a free adviser and a master of justice. My professional life has afforded me a rather close view of the training of the modern lawyer in schools, and I must say that it seems to me an intensely technical training. Even the greater and broader principles of which the elder lawyers used to discourse with a touch of broad philosophy, those principles which used to afford writers like Blackstone occasion for incidental disquisitions on the character and history of society, now wear in our teaching so technical an aspect, are seen through the medium of so many wire-drawn decisions, are covered with so thick a gloss of explanation and ingenious interpretation, that they do not wear an open and genial and human aspect, but seem to belong to some recondite and private science.

Moreover, the prepossessions of the modern lawyer are all in favor of his close identification with his clients. The lawyer deems himself in conscience bound to be contentious, to manuever for every advantage, to contribute to his clients’ benefit his skill in a difficult and hazardous game. He seldom thinks of himself as the advocate of society. His very feeling that he is the advocate now of this, now of that, and again of another special individual interest separates him from broader conceptions. He moves in the atmosphere of private rather than public service. Moreover, he is absorbed now more than ever before into the great industrial organism. His business becomes more and more complicated and specialized. His studies and his services are apt to become more and more confined to some special field of law. He grows more and more a mere expert in the legal side of a certain class of great industrial or financial undertakings. The newspapers and the public in general speak of “corporation lawyers,” and of course the most lucrative business of our time is derived from the need that the great business combinations we call corporations have at every turn of their affairs of an expert legal adviser. It is apt to happen with the most successful, and by that test the most eminent, lawyers of our American communities that by the time they reach middle life their thoughts have become fixed in very hard and definite molds. Though they have thought honestly, they are apt to have thought narrowly; they have not made themselves men of wide sympathies or discernment.

It is evident what must happen in such circumstances. The bench must be filled from the bar, and it is growing increasingly difficult to supply the bench with disinterested, unspoiled lawyers, capable of being the free instruments of society, the friends and guides of statesmen, the interpreters of the common life of the people, the mediators of the great process by which justice is led from one enlightenment and liberalization to another.

For the notable, I had almost said fundamental, circumstance of our political life is that our courts are, under our constitutional system, the means of our political development. Every change in our law, every modification of political practice, must sooner or later pass under their scrutiny. We can go only as fast as the legal habit of mind of our lawyers will permit. Our politics are bound up in the mental character and attitude and is so intensely and characteristically a legal polity that our politics depend upon our lawyers. They are the ultimate instruments of our life.

There are two present and immediate tests of the serviceability of the legal profesion to the Nation, which I think will at once be recognized as tests which it is fair to apply. In the first place, there is the cirtical matter of reform of legal procedure—the almost invariable theme, if I am not mistaken, of all speakers upon this question from the President of the United States down. America lags far behind other countries in the essential matter of putting the whole emphasis in our courts upon the substance of right and justice. If the bar associations of this country were to devote themselves, with the great knowledge and ability at their command, to the utter simplification of judicial procedure, to the abolition of technical difficulties and pitfalls, to the removal of every unnecessary form, to the absolute subordination of method to the object sought, they would do a great patriotic service, which, if they will not address themselves to it, must be undertaken by laymen and novices. The actual miscarriages of justice, because of nothing more than a mere slip in a phrase or a mere error in an immaterial form, are nothing less than shocking. Their number is incalculable, but much more incalculable than their number is the damage they do to the reputation of the profession and to the majesty and integrity of the law. Any one bar association which would show the way to radical reform in these matters would insure a universal reconsideration of the matter from one end of the country to the other and would by that means redeem the reputation of a great profession and set American society forward a whole generation in its struggle for an equitable adjustment of its difficulties.

The second and more fundamental immediate test of the profession is its attitude toward the regulation of modern business, particularly of the powers and action of modern corporations. It is absoutely necessary that society should command its instruments and not be dominated by them. The lawyer, not the layman, has the best accesss to the means by which the reforms of our economic life can be best and most fairly accomplished. Never before in our history did those who guide affairs more seriously need the assistance of those who can claim an expert familiarity with the legal processes by which reforms may be effectually accomplished. It is in this matter more than any other that our profession may now be said to be on trial. It will gain or lose the confidence of the country as it proves equal to the test or unequal.

As one looks about him at the infinite complexities of the modern problems of life, at the great tasks to be accomplished by law, at the issues of life and happiness and prosperity involved, one can not but realize how much depends upon the part the lawyer is to play in the future politics of the country. If he will not assume the rôle of patriot and of statesman, if he will not lend all his learning to the service of the common life of the country, if he will not open his sympathies to common men and enlist his enthusiasm in those policies which will bring regeneration to the business of the country, less expert hands than his must attempt the difficult and perilous business. It will be clumsily done. It will be done at the risk of reaction against the law itself. It will be done perhaps with brutal disregard of the niceties of justice, with clumsiness instead of with skill.

The tendencies of the profession, therefore, its sympathies, its inclination, its prepossessions, its training, its point of view, its motves, are part of the stuff and substance of the destiny of the country. It is these matters rather than any others that bar associations should consider; for an association is greater than the individual lawyer. It should embody not the individual ambition of the practitioner, but the point of view of society with regard to the profession. It should hold the corporate conscience and consciousness of the profession. It is inspiring to think what might happen if but one great State bar association were to make up its mind and move toward these great objects with intelligence, determination, and indomitable perseverance.

Files

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Citation

Wilson, Woodrow, 1856-1924, “The Lawyer in Politics,” 1911 July 12, WWP20687, Cary T. Grayson Papers, Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library & Museum, Staunton, Virginia.