One person can teach the lessons of the Uniform Commercial Code or Recent Developments in the Law to a large group of students or practitioners. But you can only teach the lessons of life one on one. If each of us adopted that motto as our mantra for fulfilling our professional responsibility, we would be well on the way toward changing the course of our profession. Of course not. Popular attitudes toward lawyers will always be profoundly contradictory.
Popular culture wants to view law as the overarching principles of a just and harmonious society.
Popular morality thus views the lawyer s craft oriented and client oriented perspective as an abandonment of the lawyers duty to justice. But the popular view is simplistic. It fails to recognize the unpleasant reality that our society is not neatly ordered by a spontaneous and coherent system of values. Ours is a wildly pluralistic culture in which individuals and groups struggle to achieve recognition for their private perspectives. As lawyers, we have no answers to these larger social conflicts, rather we can only speak for specific sides of these struggles.