Overview

Here is a book for which the legal world has long waited and which we think is worthy of consideration by law schools who will find it a valuable text work for supplementary course. It is of first importance to endeavor to ascertain accurately the due relation of lawyers to other interests of the community and then to inquire if they have lived up to it. What is a lawyer? What is his real mission? What relation does he bear to the government, of which he is a citizen. What are his real duties to society. Some technical books have been written about the obligations of lawyers. Warren published his lectures, the broad title of which if it had been sustained in text would have covered some of the ground gone over here. Forsyth's History of Lawyers is, a most interesting historical review of the profession from remote periods; and Sharswood has contributed a little work on Professional Ethics. And there are several books on the lawyer's technical duties and liabilities. Besides, narratives, lectures, and essays without stint have been written and published covering legal romance and history and all phases of a lawyer's life and of his relations to his client, but no one has raised the curtain upon the lawyer in his full relations to society. In all of their writings one sees that the lawyer's vision of his call.ing, seems to have extended no further than to a contemplation of his duties to his clients and to the courts. We look in vain for any adequate, distinctive treatment of this subject beyond this narrow view. It is quite well understood that to his clients the lawyer is held to unexceptionable purity of conduct and that he must be fair and honorable with the court. These duties are imperishably written upon the lawyer's mind. They seem to be a part of the milk of his education which he unconsciously imbibes before entering upon the duties of his office. The lawyers stop here in the survey of their mission and as there is no course of instruction or book which opens to them their full duties it is not surprising that they start out in professional life with a very inadequate knowledge of their calling. Fundamentally they believe that, at the top and bottom of their professional career, they should serve their client at all sacrifices sometimes even of truth and justice. Accordingly, we know of no occupation more interesting, than to attempt to hold up to the lawyer, a faithful picture of his real mission. It then will be seen, that a large number of the lawyers are delinquents to society, not with malice prepense, but from a failure to appreciate the real and full nature of their professional duties. -The American Lawyer: A Monthly Journal, Vol. 15 [1907]

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