The Colonial Lawyer
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
No, that is not my own sentiment; it is a famous quote from Shakespeare which gets bandied about a lot these days by people who seem to despise the breed. Does anyone remember the first Jurassic Park movie? The lawyer was the T-Rex’s first mouthful, and the audience actually laughed and cheered.
What is surprising is that this feeling was endemic from our earliest beginnings in the New World. In the 17th Century, some of the colonies prohibited lawyers from pleading cases unless they did it for free. The Quaker-founded state of Pennsylvania boasted that it had no need of lawyers since everyone could speak his own case and be heard. Even after the law was admitted as a profession, the size of the fee was sharply curtailed, requiring lawyers to have a second source of income, something more respectable like farming or tavern-keeping.
By the late 18th Century, when our nation was founded, lawyers had come into their own, with more than half involved in writing the Constitution which I will be studying over the next several months. This is a good thing. We are a nation of laws of our own making, and there is something precious in that.
Regarding the men who are trained to navigate through the law, I am ambivalent. I long for a more old-fashioned, pre-colonial justice where the claimant or defendant could merely state his case before a panel of peers who are able to decide the case from just plain old common sense. And then I remember the Salem Witch trials, with 20 people killed and hundreds more jailed. Common sense wasn’t there to save them. Good laws and lawyers might have.
And what happens when it’s a bad law? In the Midst of Death… deals with that topic too, as some of the characters choose to flout one of the worst injustices ever embedded into the laws of our nation, while Constable Dickens, a slave to the law if ever there was one, closed his eyes to let Jess Riordan get away with it.