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GAZETTE
MARCH 1978
commercials but that the public, educated about the costs
and nature of legal services and stimulated by an
investigative media, will want all the facts. Black robes,
professional jargon, and other legal masks will not protect
the profession, the Law Schools, the Courts, or Bar
organizations from the full disclosure the public will
demand.
Questions about costs lead to questions about need,
which lead to questions about quality, competence,
training, discipline, continuing education, and so on. The
public will want to know who runs the organized Bar,
how they are elected, what their qualifications are, and
what happens if they are not competent. They will want to
know if they can get on Bar Association Boards and
disciplinary and admission committees. In several States
public participation in the decisions of the profession is
already the practice. The public will ask with much more
impatience than in the past why competent legal services
are not available or affordable, why the Courts are
crowded, why jails and the prisons are not working, why
juvenile justice cannot be improved, why professional
discipline is secret and apparently catches so few.
In a recent address to law students, Fred Graham,
C.B.S. law correspondent, argued that Law Schools
should offer courses in Public Relations and in dealing
with the news media. This essentially modern proposal
makes some sense to me.
Given the fact that the legal profession is coming to be
perceived as a kind of public property, it follows that it is
in Law Schools that initial recognition of this charac-
teristic must be established. Chief Justice Burger has
spoken about the traditional weakness of Law Schools:
"My criticism of Legal Education, beginning when I tried
to teach law long, long ago, was that it was good on
principles and not good about people. The law in its
broadest sense is not an end in itself — it is a tool — a
means to an end. And that end is justice as nearly as
fallible humans can achieve it — for people and their
problems."
Whether Public Relations courses would be an
adequate answer to the Law School's lack of public focus
is dubious. But as a minimum, the practising profession
and Law Schools must substantially expand their
collaboration in training lawyers to ensure development of
leaders and productive members of a profession that is
open to the public and organizationally effective.
The end of privacy means that lawyers need to develop
a new psychology concerning their relationship with the
public through their professional organizations. Lawyers
by and large do not take great pride in their organisations,
and yet it is these organizations that bear ultimate
responsibility for the profession's obligations to the
public. Maybe it is to be expected that lawyers, trained to
be sceptical, are sceptical even of their own
organizations. At best they tend to involve themselves on
the profession's behalf out of a feeling of
noblesse oblige.
At worst too many of them regard their organizations as
a necessary evil, all too necessary in those States that
require membership as a condition of practice.
Public Service Is the Objective
The view of Bar Association members is too often
"What has the Bar done for me lately?" So the
profession's work is left to the few, who end up doubly
damned when those on the sidelines complain that Bar
politicians run the show. The true and historic challenge
for lawyers, privileged by public authority to occupy an
exclusive field, is "What can I do for my profession?"
For the public, which can have little understanding of or
sympathy with a lawyer's apathy about the bar, the
relevant question can only be, "What is the profession
doing for the public?"
There is more to an open legal profession than a new
professional psychology and new relationships between
lawyers, their Law Schools, and their organizations. These
changes are indispensable to effective Public Relations,
that is, communications whereby the profession
recognizes the public as its audience and begins to
address the public about itself. But they are only the
means. The produce — public service from lawyers and
their organizations in response to public needs — is the
objective. Fortunately, we are able to point to expanding
attention to both improved communications and
professional product.
Lawyers are experimenting with Public Relations and
accountability through various forms of public
participation in their organizations and activities. At the
same time they are testing a number of alternatives that
flow from their unique training and skills and from their
professionalism: expansion of legal services to the
indigent; special research projects on specific legal system
problems, such as litigation expense and delay;
development of public education programs on the law and
legal services. They are expanding Bar-sponsored research
of law-policy questions, such as the law and medical
malpractice, the law and juvenile justice, and the law of
energy supply and development.
In a sense, the challenge of an open legal profession is
to return to fundamentals. If our constitutions, bylaws,
and codes of conduct call for promoting the availability of
competent legal services, effectively disciplining our
members, ensuring a competent judiciary, and developing
essential reforms in law and its practice, the public's
concern is plain: Is this, in fact, what our record shows?
If not, why not?
The questions that must be asked and answered are
clear: What are the Bar's priority programs? What is their
worth in terms of reasonable public expectations? Will
members of the profession support the long-range effort
law reform necessarily requires? If not, what do we do
about it? Should the public subsidize or take over the
effort? If so, where do lawyers fit in?
The Media Are a "Special Prosecutor"
Do our publications and speeches influence the
leadership of our Nation, States and communities? If they
don't, what do we do — continue to publish as is, or let
the publications perish and spend the money elsewhere?
What, if anything, have we provided for public
communication in the expensive but widely used audio-
visual media?
Lawyers are not the only goldfish in the public bowl.
U.S. News and World Report's
annual survey of "Who
Runs America" is a fair inventory of the others. This year
the legal profession ranked as the eighteenth most influen-
tial institution, outranking radio, cinema, doctors,
magazines, and others. Lawyers, of course, would have it
no other way. They know that power and influence are
the ultimate prizes for their professionalism.
But the public demands that power and influence must
be exercised for the public, and it judges lawyers' profes-
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