“Hidden at the bottom of the souls of lawyers one therefore finds a part of the tastes and habits of aristocracy. They have its instinctive penchant for order, its natural love of forms; they conceive its great disgust for the actions of the multitude and secretly scorn the government of the people.”
“What lawyers love above all things is a life of order, and the greatest guarantee of order is authority.”
“The lawyer belongs to the people by his interest and by his birth, and to the aristocracy by his habits and his tastes; he is like a natural liaison between the two things, the link that unites them.”
“I am not ignorant of the inherent defects of the spirit of the lawyer; without this mixture of the spirit of the lawyer with the democratic spirit, however, I doubt that democracy could long govern society, and I cannot believe that in our day a republic could hope to preserve its existence if the influence of lawyers in its affairs did not grow in proportion with the power of the people.”
“The French lawyer is only a learned man; but the English or American man of law resembles in a way the priests of Egypt; like them, he is the lone interpreter of an occult science.”
In America there are neither nobles nor men of letters, and the people distrust the rich. Lawyers therefore form the superior political class and the most intellectual portion of society….The American aristocracy is at the attorneys’ bar and on the judges’ bench.”
And with that, I shall announce that I am going to law school this fall.
2 comments:
So brilliant, you are.
That's only five and a half hours away from me! Y'all should come visit this fall. ;-)
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