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GAZETTE
JULY/AUGUS
T 1982
Of course, this is not a full account of our thinkers
in jurisprudence. I can find some lawyering in
jurisprudential ideas of Eugen Ehrlich, H.L.A.
Hart, Hans Kelsen, Jerome Frank, Lon Fuller, and
Karl Llewellyn, but often ideas and concepts about
lawyering were slid in sideways. Almost nowhere is
there a regard for nonadversarial lawyering. I have
made meager attempts, often with the help of others.
An early article with Walter Probert (19
University of
Florida Law Review
447 (Winter, 1966-67)), another
with Thomas Shaffer (17
American Journal of Juris-
prudence
125 (1972)), and more recently Edward
Dauer (a section of
The Lawyer's
Handbook
(American Bar Association, 1975) and
Planning by
Lawyers: Materials on a Nonadversarial Legal Process
(Foundation Press, 1978)), and some other pieces of
my own are among the efforts. But these efforts are
nowhere near the possibilities and needs of the
project.
This might be enough to make the point, but I
cannot resist the temptation and desire to go further
and to express some views as to the needs for develop-
ment of the thesis. Concerning legal health and its
maintenance, we know little. Somehow we should be
curious not only about the legal needs of people but
also about the actual uses by people of the law office.
How often and for what purposes do clients and
potential clients now seek assistance of the law office?
We know so little, in short, of the legal health of our
population and the role of the law office in that
enterprise.
Structuring the methodology for that inquiry is no
easy task. At a minimum it will need at some point the
co-operation of the lawyers who operate law offices,
for the law office is the repository of great amounts of
information of the contact of the public with law. We
could use that information, if we had it, to analyze the
methods we now have to deliver legal services. We
might find ways to help maintain legal health by
periodic legal checkups, and ways to improve the
profitability and responsibility of business enterprise
by periodic legal status reports. I do not put it beyond
an inquiry that we might, through the law office as an
institution capable of improving the legal health of
people, find ways to reduce the dissatisfactions that
Pound expressed concerning the administration of
the courts.
This forecast should not neglect a brief word about
legal education, which, with its traditional attach-
ment to the appellate court opinion, has sadly
neglected the decisional processes of the law office.
Perhaps a recognition that the law office is an
institution will help to alert the academic community
to a realization of its importance. Perhaps there will
be a growing regard in academic for the intellectual
achievements of lawyers — both litigators and
preventive law lawyers. The adjustment of law
teachers to this newer concern does not come easily.
Appellate opinions are too beautiful, too numerous,
and so easily available. We need, somehow, to make
the decisional processes and inventions of lawyers as
readily available. Many are certainly as intellectually
beautiful as appellate court opinions.
The educational processes in law schools color the
emotions and minds of embryonic lawyers. When,
for example, they study so little of processes by which
disputes are settled by lawyers and so much about
court judgments, they msut get a skewed view of both
lawyering and reality. When they are so little exposed
to the decisional processes of the lawyer with the
client, they fail to see the client as a person but at most
as the name of which an appellate case is classified for
legal research.
When as little attention is given by the academic
community to the thousands of units — law offices —
producing legal services, the embryonic lawyers get
an incomplete view of the process by which justice is
pursued. It grieves me to say that it is possible to
advance in academe by keeping a respectable distance
from the law office. In fact, sometimes it seems that
the further away one gets, the greater is one's
opportunity for advancement. This fourth arm of
government deserves far more attention than the
present atmosphere permits. There is current hope.
The client is beginning to find a place in law school
education and in the concepts of jurisprudence.
We cannot understand the administration of
justice and leave out the law office. I would put it the
other way around. We understand the administration
of justice only when we start with the law office and
keep it constantly before us.D
(Louis M. Brown, who has written extensively on
preventive law, practices law in Los A ngeles and teaches
at the Unversity of Southern California Law School.)
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