Or I should say allegedly odious profession, actually. It’s Fareed Zakaria in WaPo:
One of the oft-repeated criticisms of America is that it has too many lawyers. Maybe, but one of the country’s great strengths is its legal culture. As I’ve written before, Alexis de Tocqueville worried that without a class of patriotic and selfless aristocrats, the United States could fall prey to demagogues and populists. But he took comfort in the fact that, as he put it, American aristocracy can be found “at the bar or on the bench.” Tocqueville saw that lawyers, with their sense of civic duty, created a “form of public accountability that would help preserve the blessings of democracy without allowing its untrammeled vices.”
I’ve known many lawyers, and actually I consider just about every one of them admirable people. The American Experiment is not founded on religion or military might, it’s founded on respect for the law, and the lawyers are those who implement it in all its messy details.
American contempt for lawyers is ill-founded and motivated by a few bad actors.
