ABSTRACT
Anthony Kronman’s Lost Lawyer remains the central contribution of virtue ethics to the moral theory of the legal profession. It is a strangely dichotomised work. Part One is an Aristotelian account of how traditional forms of legal practice have a distinct capacity to nurture practical wisdom in lawyers and, in doing so, prepare ‘the lawyer-statesman’ for public life beyond the law – politics, government, diplomacy. The lawyer-statesman is praised ‘for his virtue and not just his expertise‘. As the subtitle of Lost Lawyer suggests, in Part Two Kronman then presents a gloomy account of the American legal profession in the 1990s, and its shrinking capacity to prepare lawyers for statecraft. His snapshot of trends in law schools, law firms and courts suggests that legal practice is often no longer structured in ways that encourage the development of moral character and the virtue that holds it together – practical wisdom or prudence (phronēsis).
This chapter will present Lost Lawyer’s theory as an important account of legal practice as a morally worthy undertaking. It will locate Lost Lawyer in the rise of virtue ethics in moral theory since the 1950s and therefore grapple with the critics (Dare) who object to Kronman’s theory precisely because it is virtue ethics. The chapter will also explore Kronman’s idea of phron?sis as the simultaneous exercise of sympathy and detachment in relation to client business and how, when compared with earlier efforts at bringing virtue ethics into lawyer’s ethics (Postema, Shaffer), it gives a more satisfying explanation of the connection between legal practice and the development of moral character. The gloom of Part Two will also be addressed. Kronman limited his critique to ‘a crisis in the American legal profession’, and this begs the question whether there has been a comparable crisis in other common law professions. The arguments that Part Two’s sociology of the American legal profession in the 1990s is exaggerated will also be investigated. They leave room to consider whether Lost Lawyer is not only a compelling and positive ethics for lawyers, but one that the contemporary lawyer can achieve.
