ABSTRACT
To judge from Anthony Kronman’s The Lost Lawyer: Failing Ideals of the Legal Profession, gloom is the order of the day. A brief initial reference to its author’s disposition will help build the context of the present essay. The Lost Lawyer laments the passing of the ‘lawyer-statesman’ and a prudential practical wisdom revered in common law tradition. The following is a representative sketch of this persona:
[H]owever deep a lawyer’s devotion to the public good, one who possesses the traits [of prudential practical wisdom] also accepts, to a degree no moral zealot can, the irreconcilable diversity of human goods, and therefore tends to see in every controversial alteration of his society’s arrangements some loss as well as an opportunity for gain. As a result, such a lawyer is unlikely to be moved by that passion for purity which motivates the adherents of every great political simplification and to be more comfortable with strategies of compromise and delay. Recognising the moral imperative for change, the lawyer who embraces this ideal will nevertheless prefer to move slowly and by small degrees. He or she will be repelled by all programs of Utopian ambition, whether Platonic or Kantian or Benthamite in inspiration, and in the quirks and absurdities of the status quo will be likely to see what no Utopian can: a whole series of unthoughtout local compromises and adjustments that reflect the plurality of human goods and soften the consequences of their inevitable conflicts.
