Portrait of a Profession in Paralysis

Abstract

Reading Deborah Rhode's book on the legal profession is a profoundly depressing experience. This is precisely because of the book's understatement. Unlike many of the recent jeremiads lamenting the fall of the profession from a golden age of ethical practice and public service, In the Interests of Justice is far from an undiscriminating broadside against the bar and its works. Rhode strives to be restrained, temperate and discriminating in her critiques. Unlike most of the political and media critics of the profession, she relies on a substantial body of sober research on lawyers and their work rather than on anecdotal horror stories. Indeed she uses this research to defend lawyers against some of the more common attacks on them, such as that criminal defense lawyers regularly bring about the release of dangerous criminals on technicalities, and that personal injury lawyers are seriously damaging the American economy by deluging businesses with frivolous lawsuits. (The real scandals, as she points out, are that most accused criminals get no effective representation at all and that most valid personal injury claims never reach the tort system and remain uncompensated.) Nor is her book purely destructive, an indictment without remedies. Although often acerbic, her tone is detached and diagnostic rather than polemical or accusing. She has many practical proposals for reform, which on the whole are modest, incremental, sensible, and entirely feasible.