The legal profession has always recognized literature as one of its chief sources of nourishment. Whatever Watergate may reflect about the posture of the legal profession in America, it is fair to say that good lawyers are also good readers, good play goers, good concert goers, and good patrons of art.
Lawyers are word-mongers and recognize the great writers as the masters of the game.
In earlier times, for example in late 18th and early 19th century America, practicing lawyers relied primarily on their wits, with refer- ence to the Bible, to Blackstone, and to Shakespeare. Taking these three works as prototypes and not literally, it is easy to see that they represented moral values, legal concepts, and social ideas. In today's law school curriculum, the moral values represented by the Bible are encapulated in courses on jurisprudence. The Blackstone prototype is represented by lated in more than nine-tenths of today's curriculum, which is devoted to descriptions of the various segments of the law, such as contracts, torts, property, taxation, labor law, corporations. Oddly enough, however, there are few courses devoted to the ideas represented by the earlier lawyers' reliance on Shakespeare.