The Citizen Lawyer: a Brief Informal History of a Myth with Some Basis
THE CITIZEN LAWYER-A BRIEF INFORMAL HISTORY OF A MYTH WITH SOME BASIS IN REALITY ROBERT W. GORDON* The term "citizen lawyer" seems to be shorthand for a complex assortment of social types, but the core meaning is plain enough. The citizen lawyer is a lawyer who acts in a significant part of his or her professional life with some plausible vision of the public good and the general welfare in mind. Of course, citizen lawyers, like most lawyers, may seek wealth, power, fame, and reputation for themselves. They may also represent and further the ends of clients with distinctly selfish or antisocial interests. What makes them citizen lawyers, then, is that they also devote time and effort to public ends and values: the service of the Republic, their communi- ties, the ideal of the rule of law, and reforms to enhance the law's efficiency, fairness, and accessibility.' So general and bland a definition would, I expect, command agreement from most lawyers. But it covers up deep divisions among the views that lawyers have traditionally held on the proper scope of their public or civic obligations. American lawyers' starting point for conventional reasoning about these roles, more or less a constant throughout its history, is like that of professions of advocates elsewhere: that lawyers effectively produce the public goods of justice and the rule of law by just doing their regular day jobs, zealously serving their clients.2 * Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and Legal History, Yale University. 1. See W. Taylor Reveley III, The Citizen Lawyer, 50 WM.
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