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GAZETTE
JULY/AUGUST 1992
A Profess ion
. . . If We Can Keep It
The Honorable Martin L .C
Feldman, United States District
Judge, was a member of a delegation
from New Orleans which visited
Ireland as guests of the Dublin
Solicitors Bar Association. In the
course of a speech to the DSBA he
raised some pertinent questions
about the future of the profession.
You have no doubt received some of
the finest education on this planet.
You belong to an ancient and
honoured profession and I assume
you view that profession as having a
high social purpose. For it is the
Law which is the centerpiece of
western civilization.
And so I write here about a subject
which has long been simmering
within me over the years I have been
a Federal Judge . . . the incipient
peril, as I view it, that our
profession, in America and perhaps
in Ireland too, is becoming
something else. A business. That
lawyers in America are gradually but
steadily paying more attention to
bottom lines, billable hours, and
marketing techniques, than to their
public responsibilities, to how their
work enhances social institutions and
our quality of life and to their
obligations as officers of the court
and of loyalty to the client. It is
important that you consider these
comments if the same environment
exists in your country. But it is even
more important that you consider
them, if you have thus far escaped
the recent American experience, to
guard against its occurrence.
What, exactly, is it that makes a
profession different from other
endeavours?
The famous Dean Pound of Harvard
Law School once defined
"profession" as "the practice of a
learned art in the public interest".
Judge
Feldman
Recently, another famous American
lawyer, Dean Griswold, intoned a
clairvoyant admonition when the
Dean told a group of lawyers, "We
have a profession - if we can keep
it." Like Dean Griswold, I believe
that our profession is losing sight of
its purpose, losing the identity of its
soul, ignoring its higher sense of
calling. Lawyers, it seems to me, are
forgetting that the Law is not any
less a profession simply because
lawyers must earn a living. It is
appropriate, therefore, that you as
my professional colleagues should be
asked to never ignore the fact that
you pursue a Learned Art, in Dean
Pound's famous words, and that you
are not managers of a commercial
company; that you act daily in the
Public Interest, not out of personal
gratification but in the interest of
strengthening the very foundation of
orderly societies. Those are not
hollow words, unless you let
cynicism contaminate their meaning.
You see, you are not just mere profit
centres for law firms who are
competing to record the most
billable hours for a given month in
order to receive two tickets to the
next local soccer match; you are
lawyers, obliged to resolve (some in
court, some out) conflicts for clients;
often implicating issues that bind the
very core of the hope for civilised
existence; and in the process you and
only you keep those conflicts off the
streets and from the battlefields. You
are why we no longer rely on trial by
battle, or trial by ordeal, or wager
of law with all its archaic
mechanisms.
We lawyers are different. In Ireland
and in America. Maybe that's why
we always seem to be under the
higher scrutiny of others. Lawyers
have given nations more presidents,
public servants, statesmen,
philanthropists, charitable and
community leaders, than any other
calling on Earth. I think we have
done so because of an implicit
understanding of the importance and
meaning of the professional oath.
Although currently fashionable
aggressive marketing techniques in
my country used by some lawyers
would take the contrary view, I can
assure you that you need not become
the head of a charity board, for
example, to get clients . . . you need
to be a good lawyer and a good
person. It is just as simple as that.
Not terribly long ago, the spectre of
Bhopal, with hordes of lawyers
literally swarming all across a
country soliciting cases on the backs
of those miserable victims, sadly
painted for the public worldwide a
vivid and ugly picture of lawyers as
parasites, not as leaders and role
models. From my vantage point, the
symptoms I see are widespread.
Solicitation, of the Bhopal strain, is
only one malady which has infected
our profession. Another, in America,
is advertising, which in my judgment
creates hucksters, not lawyers. The
American system is under attack
with some in respectable quarters
arguing that the attack is deserved,
including the Vice President of the
United States, himself a lawyer. Who
can deny that too many lawyers
bring too many disputes into too