The Lost Lawyer : Failing Ideals of the Legal Profession [Paperback]

Anthony Kronman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 15, 1995 | ISBN-10: 0674539273 | ISBN-13: 978-0674539273

Anthony Kronman describes a spiritual crisis affecting the American legal profession, and attributes it to the collapse of what he calls the ideal of the lawyer-statesman: a set of values that prizes good judgment above technical competence and encourages a public-spirited devotion to the law.

For nearly two centuries, Kronman argues, the aspirations of American lawyers were shaped by their allegiance to a distinctive ideal of professional excellence. In the last generation, however, this ideal has failed, undermining the identity of lawyers as a group and making it unclear to those in the profession what it means for them personally to have chosen a life in the law.

A variety of factors have contributed to the declining prestige of prudence and public-spiritedness within the legal profession. Partly, Kronman asserts, it is the result of the triumph, in legal thought, of a counterideal that denigrates the importance of wisdom and character as professional virtues. Partly, it is due to an array of institutional forces, including the explosive growth of the country's leading law firms and the bureaucratization of our courts. The Lost Lawyer examines each of these developments and illuminates their common tendency to compromise the values from which the ideal of the lawyer-statesman draws strength. It is the most important critique of the American legal profession in some time, and an an enduring restatement of its ideals.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

America's lawyers are viewed with ambivalence. The best, perhaps embodied by Atticus Finch in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird , combine judgment and principle with something of the scholar's love of the pursuit of truth. Yet Dan Quayle questions lawyers' basic honesty and trustworthiness at the annual American Bar Association convention. Kronman (law, Yale Univ.) worries about the decline of the "lawyer-statesman," that lawyer who possesses more than just technical proficiency in legal persuasion. Kronman sees Abraham Lincoln and, more recently, the late Chief Justice Earl Warren as just such "lawyer-statesmen." Both possessed those traits of prudence, wisdom, and judgment that counted far more than legal expertise. Their absence underlies the crisis facing the American legal profession. This is an interesting book, but it won't change many of the well-entrenched opinions about lawyers. For academic and larger public library legal collections.
- Jerry E. Stephens, U.S. Court of Appeals Lib., Oklahoma City
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

An eloquent and provocative book. When you listen to...[Kronman's] diagnoses of just what has gone wrong with the job of lawyering today, you begin to see that the spreading disaffection of lawyers for their work should not be underestimated.
--Michael Orey (American Lawyer )

[This book] is an eloquent and impassioned work of scholarship. It makes an important contribution to the growing body of literature devoted to the study of the legal profession.
--Anthony V. Alfieri (Michigan Law Review )

Kronman deploys philosophical acumen and wide learning to revive the ideal of the lawyer--whether counselor, advocate, scholar, teacher, or judge--as practitioner of a kind of wisdom that he argues has long been out of fashion. This is an important book.
--Charles Fried, Harvard Law School

Many thoughtful observers of the legal profession have come to wonder whether the profession's traditional aspirations can possibly flourish in the current conditions of practice. Kronman is one of several critics to conclude, regretfully, that those aspirations are doomed...If lawyers could spare any time to read, The Lost Lawyer should really make them sit up and take notice of what has happened to them.
--Robert W. Gordon, Stanford Law School

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 440 pages
• Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (March 15, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674539273
• ISBN-13: 978-0674539273
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #381,441 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars RESCUING THE FADING IDEALS OF ADVOCACY, October 21, 2002

By 

Luciano Lupini (Caracas Venezuela) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Lost Lawyer : Failing Ideals of the Legal Profession (Paperback)

This is a very interesting book by Yale's Law School Dean, Anthony Kronman about law schools, legal teaching, the practice of law, Courts and the governing principles of law firms nowadays in the United States.
The central idea is that the modern American legal profession is in a crisis, a crisis of morale. Disguised by the material rewards of the profession, the downturn has been brought about by the demise of the traditional set of values that until recently played a definitive role in the aspirations of American lawyers. According to the author, previous generations of lawyers conceived their highest aim to be an attainment of practical wisdom about human beings and their affairs- that anyone who wishes to provide effective and real deliberative counsel must possess. This wisdom was perceived as a result acquired only by becoming a person of good judgment, and not merely an expert in technical matters of the law. The cultivation of this character virtue, was an important professional ideal, and contributed fundamentally to the perception that lawyers had about the intrinsic value of their work. And it is this ideal which is now dying in the legal profession. Lawyers find it increasingly difficult to attribute intrinsic fulfillment to their profession. Mainly, as the attention shifts to other means (material, metalegal, etc.) for fulfillment, lawyers cultivate less the traditional values and are ill prepared to provide sound legal and political advise. So, Kronman embarks in a journey to restate the original ideals of what he calls the lawyer-stateman. Therefore, in the first part of the book, he seeks to define and defend more demanding standards of professional excellence. In doing so, he dwells with some complex philosophical issues involved, in simple terms. In the second part we get a more practical and sociological analysis of legal institutions and their cultural dynamics: the current shape of the Courts, legal schools, legal firms, and other institutions involved.
Why should this book be read by all lawyers and students? Because it provides a clear diagnostic of most of the shortcomings of the profession and clues to possible solutions.
Anybody involved in the legal profession as a lawyer, cannot avoid the sensation of looking at a mirror when reading: "The fascination with moneymaking that pervades large-firms practice today tends, in a subtle but significant way, to unsettle the delicate balance between sympathy and detachment in which practical wisdom consists"..."a culturally reinforced preoccupation with money makes it more difficult to sustain the kind of self-forgetfulness required to deliberate for and with another person on his or her behalf"..."this demands that he temporarily suspend his own interests, for only by doing so can he clear an effective space in which his client's interests may be entertained with real feeling".
And in fact, as Kronman states, many modern clients are primarily concerned with making money, and this goal can distort the lawyer's advice by not telling the client that the option that yields the most money, is not the best one overall. The lawyer who is a believer of the money making process and shares his client concern for money, can find it difficult to avoid mistakes in its own deliberations......

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Misfire Worth Reading, December 19, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Lost Lawyer : Failing Ideals of the Legal Profession (Paperback)

Charlotte Rampling, beautiful and tear-stained, has a minor breakdown midway through The Verdict--she's fallen for Paul Newman, the lawyer she's been assigned to seduce and spy on by her boss at the big, evil law firm. James Mason, the suave evil boss, consoles her with a drink and an apothegm: "You don't get paid to do your best," Mason says. "You get paid to win." That scene (expertly written by David Mamet) explains the legal profession in America and provides a summary of Kronman's argument. Kronman, the current Dean of Yale Law, bemoans the extinction of lawyers of sound judgment, prudence, and a concern for a range of interests--the client's, the law's, society's, etc. Lawyers who were actively involved with their community and their country, who were looked to as figures of wisdom, not avarice. But Kronman is more diagnostic than prescriptive. He's right--that breed of lawyer has all but vanished. Still, he provides little in the way of practical suggestions for correcting the problem. And his focus is on the profession and the law schools. His focus should be on the free market. Elite American law schools are catering to the needs of the large firms, which are catering to the needs of their corporate clients. To graduate marketable lawyers, the schools have to create skilled technicians. The hiring partner at a Wall Street Firm wants to know that an applicant has the stamina necessary to put in the hours, and the intelligence and tools needed to grind out competent work. No one is interested in his or her views about what might be a more prudent approach to the client's problem; his or her judgment is not only not demanded, it's unwelcome. Kronman's focus is too narrow. The legal profession has become the law business. Because that's what's demanded by clients, who pay the tab. So I think he should have examined the underpinnings of the free market system, which I favor but which is responsible for the shift in legal education and law practice. Also, how does one teach prudence? How does a vocational school--or perhaps any school--instil sound judgment? Furthermore, prudence and judgment are qualities that, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder. Finally, Kronman's assertion that much of the problem arose when the large Protestant law firms started hiring Jews, African-Americans, women, and associates from the working classes and from second and third-tier schools sounds not only wrong, but bizarrely priggish and elitist in all the wrong ways. Kronman, as far as I can tell, has never practiced law for any length of time, nor has he toiled as a judge. He's spent his career locked in the Ivory Tower of academia, and his book is the high-toned result.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Must read for any lawyer wondering why they went to law school, September 30, 2009

By 

William P. Carlucci - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Lost Lawyer : Failing Ideals of the Legal Profession (Paperback)

A friend gave me a copy of this book during my term as the President of the Pennsylvania Bar Association. Kronman explains that, for generations, lawyers were sought out for their wise counsel on matters of personal and professional importance to their clients. Since the rise of formal legal education (read the rise of university law schools) lawyers have become experts in arcane aspects of statutory and common law, but less and less inclined to become "public citizens." State legislatures, formerly rich with the participation of citizen lawyers, are now populated with the favorite sons and daughters of whatever private interest group supported their candidacy. Lawyers, who for the first century of our Republic, helped clients find their way, now charge hefty (some would say exorbitant) fees to help clients get their way. In the process, the status of the profession of law has been reduced to that of mercenary soldier. One reviewer questioned why Kronman does not offer a solution to the problem. I suggest that the solution is self-evident. We lawyers must resolve to become the kind of citizen lawyers who populated the Continental Congress, and we must do so one lawyer at a time.