(Papers to be published in ABA Journal of the Professional Lawyer)
One or more presenters to be selected from Call for Papers.
Twenty years after Professor Anthony Kronman published his seminal and controversial book, THE LOST LAWYER: FAILING IDEALS OF THE LEGAL PROFESSION, the question of the role of attorneys in society is more important than ever. In Kronman’s view, early generations of American Lawyers saw the attainment of practical wisdom as their ultimate professional goal. They understood that this wisdom was a character trait “that one acquires only by becoming a person of good judgment, and not just an expert in the law.” Cultivating and exercising this trait was a professional ideal that Kronman called the “lawyer-statesman ideal.” The name stressed the ideal’s “roots in the past and the air of obsolescence” surrounding it. The ideal described someone with great practical wisdom, exceptional persuasive powers, a devotion to the public good, forgetfulness of one’s self, sympathy for others, and excellent intellectual skills. Kronman examined the lawyer–statesman ideal in the profession’s three major branches—law schools, law firms, and the courts—and warned that the profession was “in danger of losing its soul.”
Today, tsunami-like forces of change are buffeting the legal profession. Those forces include decreasing law school applications, increasing student debt, diminishing employment prospects, contracting law school budgets, curricular reform, lawyer unemployment and layoffs, rapid technological change, shrinking judicial resources in the face of expanding dockets, increasing bureaucratization of our courts, and many Americans’ lack of access to legal assistance and justice.
Business Meeting at Program Conclusion.