In a speech at the Rockefeller Center yesterday titled "The Failing Ideals of the Legal Profession," Yale Law School Dean Anthony Kronman decried the damage currently being done to the field of law by commercialization and privatization.
Speaking to a crowd of mostly male students -- and also including College President James Freedman -- Kronman pointed to the breakdown of legal ethics in the devolution of traditional values. He also spoke of the increasing need for service to a society that demands almost total devotion to the client's cause at the seeming cost of moral responsibility.
While he lauded the advances that the legal field has made in terms of the diversity of its members, he cautioned the crowd to beware a trend that he said is threatening to disintegrate one of America's oldest and most vital professions.
Kronman concentrated on what he referred to as the four ideals that have caused law to blossom into a field that has played an integrated role in American social-political life. He also spoke of the four aspects of the modern world that have begun to threaten that role.
To explain the four ideals that sustained the legal profession, Kronman essentially praised the holistic education that used to enable lawyers to "not only serve their clients, but to keep an eye to the public good."
Aside from this moral obligation, lawyers were instructed to open up their minds -- not only to knowledge, but to other people's points of view. In addition, he said, the craft of law enabled lawyers to avoid specialization and to feel connections to the past.
He said he feared that "changes which have overtaken the profession in the last 25 years have chipped away at the aspect of professionalism that allows law to have an integrated role."
Kronman suggested that four forces caused by today's modern world are serving to undermine the legal profession by countering the four traditional ideals which have sustained it thus far. He argued that commercialization and privatization, by placing an emphasis on the monetary advantages of law, are encouraging lawyers to abandon their commitment to the public good.
In addition, he voiced his concerns that law will be unable to maintain itself as a holistic, generalized field, as the sheer magnitude of the field forces today's lawyers to specialize themselves into niches -- which Kronman said deprives lawyers of the personal meaning lawyers were once able to find.
As he put it, "it's hard to hold onto roots when the world is being remade every 30 seconds around you."
In concluding his remarks, Kronman addressed the impact of forces in the market on the legal profession. Ironically, he drew on the social analysis of Karl Marx, who suggested that even the oldest and most established professions would be swept away by the tide of capitalism and questioned whether this would be the fate of the legal profession or whether there was a way to "fight back."
Kronman, a graduate of Williams College, has taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Minnesota.
The speech -- the first effort of the Roger S. Aaron Lecture Series -- was greeted with significant applause from the audience, many of whom lingered afterward to ask questions of Kronman.
