Lawyer Quotes - Norwell High School
Changing Perceptions Of Lawyers in America
Historically, American lawyers have been respected, although their public approval ratings never matched those of physicians or the clergy. After all, the lawyers’ most publicized role is criminal defense; many people will never view with approval a profession that they believe puts dangerous criminals back on the street.
Nevertheless, during most of American history, people thought that lawyers could be trusted and that the profession had considerable prestige. Writing in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville stated: “as the lawyers form the only enlightened class whom the people do not mistrust, they are naturally called upon to occupy most of the public stations.” No one would dream of writing that today. In the last twenty-five years, the public’s opinion of lawyers has turned sharply negative. Nowadays, American lawyers are distrusted and despised.
This assertion is supported by a large amount of polling data. One source, the Harris Poll gathers data each year about the public’s confidence in various institutions. In 1973, 24 percent of the public had confidence in law firm leadership, a figure which placed law firm leadership ahead of most institutions of government. The figure plunged to 7 percent in 1997, far below all other major institutions including such suspect groups as the leadership of Wall Street, organized labor, big business, or the military, as well as the White House, Congress, and the press. Indeed, the 7 percent figure was the lowest number ever recorded by Harris in the thirty years it has been taking this particular poll.
Reasons for the Decline in Public Perception of Lawyers.
What might account for the precipitous decline in public esteem for the legal profession? No one really knows the answer to this question, but there are a number of likely possiblilities. Probably each of these factors accounts for some part of the decline and, collectively, they probably account for most of it.
During the 1980s and 1990s, the income of lawyers, particularly in law firms, rose sharply; the staggering fees awarded to the plaintiffs’ lawyers in the tobacco litigation exacerbated the problem. In the past, data about lawyer incomes was secret but the media now routinely publish information about law firm profits. Many people feel that lawyers are vastly overpaid, and that the amount of income diverted to lawyers is harmful to the economy. During those decades, the commitment of big firms toward pro bono activity declined steadily. To many, in and out of the legal profession, law has become much more a profit-making business than an honorable profession. Needless to say, this perception does not enhance the public’s confidence in the profession.
Moreover, during this time, the number of lawyers rose sharply and, at least in popular perception, the amount of litigation increased dramatically. Moreover, the public perceived that there was a great increase in frivolous litigation (the famous McDonald’s coffee case is often cited as an example) (see litigiousness).
Many people think that the decline in public esteem for the profession began with the Watergate scandal in 1973; in that imbroglio, nearly all of the protagonists were lawyers. This trend was exacerbated by such publicized trials as the O. J. Simpson case in 1995, in which defense lawyers like Johnny Cochran were widely blamed for what some of the public saw as a miscarriage of justice. Saturation media coverage of famous trials brings them into millions of homes, and irresponsible news analyses of the trials oversimplifies them, treating them as entertainment.
During the 1980s and 1990s, there were sharp increases in the rates of crime, divorce, and bankruptcy. As a result, more people came into contact with lawyers in intensely unpleasant situations; lawyers took part of the blame for the crime wave. During this time, government regulation of business became more intrusive; many business people blame lawyers for this unwelcome development. More generally, many people came to distrust all institutions and power centers; certainly the bar was not immune. During this period also, mass communications changed; the prominence of radio talk shows and internet bulletin boards seems to have intensified the negativity of criticism of many elements of society, lawyers definitely not excepted.
During this period, the costs, delays, and complexity of litigation worsened. People think that lawyers behave less ethically and more uncivilly than before and the discovery process has become much more costly, protracted and unpleasant.
An important contributor to the public’s negative attitude toward the legal profession may be widespread television advertising that seems to encourage people to invent phony personal injury claims, weasel out of their debts, or escape the consequences of drunk driving. Television advertising went from zero in the late 1970s to hundreds of millions of dollars per year today. While TV advertising soared, public esteem for lawyers plunged.
The legal profession became the target of well-organized and funded public relations campaigns. Big business attacked personal injury lawyers, particularly those representing claimants in products liability cases. Some government officials got on the bandwagon, broadly condemning the legal profession for the lack of American economic competitiveness.
Bad Lawyers in Popular Culture.
Evidence of the public’s venomously negative view of lawyers and the legal profession is plain for all to see. Everyone has heard lawyer jokes, many of them quite nasty. It is no accident that lawyer jokes repeatedly describe lawyers as shark bait or road kill. Jokes directed at racial or national groups or at women are no longer socially acceptable, but jokes aimed at lawyers are considered in impeccable taste.
The media of popular culture, especially movies and print, have strongly and consistently reflected the bad public image of lawyers. Prior to the 1980s, the vast majority of lawyers in film were portrayed very positively. Not all the movie lawyers were as skillful, admirable, and heroic as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, Paul Biegler in Anatomy of a Murder, or Henry Drummond in Inherit the Wind, but many came close. On television, Perry Mason and Matlock saved innocent people from prison every single week by discovering the real killer in the back of the courtroom. On The Defenders, two noble and selfless lawyers tackled every possible social and legal problem on behalf of their clients. In print, lawyers were favorably portrayed in countless novels, including To Kill a Mockingbird, Peyton Place, and By Love Possessed.
Beginning in the 1970s, however, the portrayal of lawyers in popular culture changed sharply. In film, the vast majority of lawyers were repulsive human beings, unethical or incompetent lawyers, or both. Consider first three path-breaking films of the late 1970s and early 1980s—The Verdict, … And Justice for All, and Body Heat. In the Verdict, plaintiff’s lawyer Frank Galvin is a washed-up drunk, soliciting business at strangers’ funerals and totally neglecting a malpractice case that is about to come to trial. Defense lawyer Ed Concannon tries every dirty trick in the book, including planting a sexual spy in the opponent’s camp and bribing an expert witness to disappear. … And Justice for All lampoons the criminal justice system; nearly all the attorneys and judges are dishonest, uncaring, or repulsive people—some of them are outright criminals themselves. In Body Heat, lawyer Ned Racine is lazy, greedy, incompetent, and easily persuaded by the alluring Matty Walker to help do away with Matty’s husband.
Countless movies followed in the footsteps of these three films. In The Firm, a respected tax law firm turns out to be a front for the mob, and the partners are vicious killers. In Liar Liar, attorney Fletcher Reede is pathologically incapable of telling the truth either in court or in his personal life. He thinks nothing of putting on perjured testimony; his law firm consists of a bunch of dishonest sharks. The Devil’s Advocate took the demonization of lawyers to its logical extreme; law firm managing partner John Milton is the devil himself. As Satan, he explains that being a Wall St. lawyer is the “ultimate backstage pass. It’s the new priesthood.” In The Star Chamber, a group of embittered judges form a vigilante group to kill criminal defendants who escaped the criminal justice system through legal technicalities. In Philadelphia, a law firm fires a young lawyer who is stricken with AIDS and lies to cover it up. And there are many, many others.
In print, recent years have seen a veritable tsunami of lawyer novels. Leading the pack is John Grisham, currently the best selling writer in the world. In numerous smash hit novels, including The Rainmaker, The Firm, The Partner, The Runaway Jury, and The Brethren, Grisham portrays nearly every practicing lawyer, prosecutor, or judge as a greedy and dishonest scoundrel. Grisham’s lawyers lie, cheat, and steal, usually with impunity. In his books, with few exceptions, the only worthy characters are law students or professors, lawyers working for free, or lawyers who have just entered the profession and have not yet been tainted by it. Many other novelists have followed Grisham’s example, writing legal thrillers in which the killers generally turn out to be lawyers. Yet, not all the lawyers in print are evil; Scott Turow’s fine novels are more balanced and contain some quite positive lawyer portrayals. But on the whole, print lawyers are a scummy lot.
Things are different on television, however. The most important law show of the late 1980s and early 1990s was L.A. Law, the first lawyer show on television to focus on a law firm as opposed to a solo lawyer. Especially in its early years, L.A. Law was an enormous critical and popular success. On L.A. Law, some of the lawyers such as managing partner Douglas Brackman or family law specialist Arnold Becker were unpleasant characters, but the rest of the lawyers were very favorably portrayed. On the whole, L.A. Law represented the world of lawyers and law firms as challenging, exciting, and financially rewarding; yet it was a world in which lawyers did a great deal of good.
L.A. Law has been followed by numerous other lawyer shows, all of which portray lawyers favorably. Law and Order paints a very positive picture of prosecutors; The Practice does the same for defense lawyers. JAG portrays military lawyers favorably, as does Family Law for family lawyers and Picket Fences for a small-town solo practitioner. Ally McBeal is harder to classify; this is a female buddy show that happens to be set in a law firm, but the public likes and empathizes with the zany lawyer characters.
It is interesting to speculate on why law and lawyers on television differ so sharply from law and lawyers in film and print. The explanation, probably, lies in the nature of weekly television series. In order for a series to be successful, the public must like and empathize with most of the characters. Nobody wants to invite into their living rooms every week a cast of repulsive, dishonest creeps. This is not a problem with movies or print, however; here the emphasis is on a good story. Every good story requires a good antagonist and if that antagonist is a slimeball lawyer, so much the better.
Clearly, the portrayal of lawyers in film and in print reflects the public’s stridently negative attitude toward attorneys. This is unsurprising; popular culture can usually be relied upon to mirror public opinion. Filmmakers are trying to sell tickets, so films are unlikely to trash popular characters such as grandmothers, algebra teachers, pharmacists, or rabbis. But unpopular groups are definitely fair game; if people hate lawyers, writers will write about hateful lawyers, and producers and investors will select such stories from the vast array of choices available to them.
A more interesting question is whether the consistent and harshly negative treatment of lawyers in film and print might be one of the causes for the public’s hatred of the legal profession. There is every reason to believe that negative stereotypes in popular culture can create and intensify negative beliefs in the consumers of the culture. As a thought experiment, ask yourself what it was like to fight the Germans or Japanese in the Second World War. Undoubtedly even if you had a vast amount of information on the subject, your perception came not from history books or discussing the war with people who were there, but instead from fictitious films like Saving Private Ryan. Popular culture is a powerful teacher—perhaps the most powerful ever known.
If that is true, it seems likely that ordinary people are obtaining much or even most of their information about law, lawyers, and the legal system from fictitious stories in film, television, and books. This theory is supported by psychological studies of the “cultivation effect.” Cultivation theorists show that in making quick judgments (such as answering questions in a poll), people draw heavily on what they learned from television or film. Heavy television watchers, for example, believe in a “meaner” world than light viewers; they think the crime rate is higher and there are far more police officers, lawyers, or prostitutes, more alcoholism and drug abuse, than do light viewers of television.
Cultivation theorists believe this is no accident; they contend that heavy exposure to television actually changes people’s opinions. They analogize the mind to a series of files or bins; when someone is asked a question, they mentally pull information from the relevant bin. Information drawn from popular culture is deposited in the bins along with information drawn from personal experience or other sources. However, people do not “source discount,” meaning they do not differentiate between information derived from real events and fictitious stories. These bins are accessed from the top down. Whether an individual accesses a particular piece of data in the bin depends heavily on whether the item has been encountered frequently, and recently and how vividly it was communicated.
Research on the television show L.A. Law strongly supported the application of the cultivation effect to information about law and lawyers. The investigators found that heavy watchers of L.A. Law had more favorable opinions about attorneys than people who never or seldom watched the show. Heavy consumers of the program gave lawyers a more favorable rating on such characteristics as composure, physical attractiveness, power, presence, and sociability than did nonviewers of the show. The same even held true for lawyers; those who watched the show had more favorable opinions of lawyers in general than lawyers who never watched it.
Since lawyers in film and in novels are presented in a strongly negative way, and such presentations are both frequent and vivid, it seems likely that these portrayals do negatively influence people’s opinions of lawyers. On the other hand, lawyers on television are usually presented favorably; these representations may well offset the negative effect of the movies and books.
Conclusion.
It is an unfortunate fact of life that Americans hate lawyers and the legal profession. It is unfortunate because this attitude often affects actual behavior—as jurors, voters, or legislators. In California, for example, Governor Pete Wilson in 1988 withdrew funds from the state bar, bringing to a grinding halt all bar activities such as attorney discipline, continuing education, and client protections. The governor stated that this action was the most popular thing he had done during his eight-year incumbency.
There are undoubtedly many reasons why lawyers have fallen so far and so fast in public esteem. Many of these reasons reflect serious problems with the legal profession. There may well be too many lawyers and too much litigation; lawyers’ fees and incomes may be too high; legal advertising showcases the profession at its worst; all too often, lawyers make litigation costlier and more unpleasant than it needs to be; and lawyers often act in a rude and uncivil way toward each other and toward litigants and witnesses. Perhaps the negative portrayal of lawyers in film and in print is yet another reason why people hate lawyers, although surely not among the most important.
The profession could do much to restore public opinion. Finding ways to speed up and simplify litigation (such as by sharply limiting the discovery process) would be a good place to begin. As mentioned before, improving the civility of lawyer interactions with other lawyers and witnesses would be very desirable. The profession’s image would undoubtedly be enhanced if the flow of lawyers entering the profession were curtailed. Finally, American lawyers should make a renewed commitment to render pro bono legal services to the poor (such commitments have been declining for many years). If lawyers become sufficiently concerned about their public image, the profession can begin to take steps to improve it.
Lawyers, Popular Perceptions Of - Reasons for the Decline in Public Perception of Lawyers., Bad Lawyers in Popular Culture., Conclusion
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