The Representation of the Poor in American Society: A Subjective Estimate of the Prospects of Democracy

Abstract

After nearly ten years in which most of my practice as a lawyer has been among the indigent or those otherwise dispossessed or disowned by society, it has become impossible for me to think dispassionately or consider hypothetically or address academically the issues of the representation of the poor in politics and in the law in America. I suspect that there is, about these matters, no such thing as objectivity anyway; I know there is no option of neutrality about them. It would be pretentious for me to feign objectivity; it would amount to fraud to assert that I am neutral. Be cautioned, therefore, that in what follows I speak as a partisan-as someone with a definite viewpoint-though, in doing so, I trust, I thereby uphold the discipline of advocacy which is the venerable societal office of the lawyer. My viewpoint regarding the representation of the poor in society, especially in the realms of politics, legislation, administration of the law, and litigation, is, of course, informed by my own practice among the poor. No doubt every reader who is a lawyer is similarly positioned in relation to his own particular experience in practice, whatever it happens to be, whether he is specifically conscious of that or not, unless he be some mere legal mechanic who forbears to reflect as a human being upon the work he does every day. I am a Christian, moreover, which means that the focus of my attention in work, as well as everything else, is upon this world and the possibility and actuality in this world of mature human life in society. Biblically and empirically, the Christian concern is characteristically mundane, not spiritual. If there be preachers who none the less deny this world and vainly talk of other worlds or after lives, if there be ministers of institutional religion who spread a word that Christianity is bothered only with personalistic salvation and not with the corporate existence of mankindand there are legions of them-then they are either knaves or harlots: it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the two. They had better read the Bible more avidly