Legal profession

Legal profession, vocation that is based on expertise in the law and in its applications. Although there are other ways of defining the profession, this simple definition may be best, despite the fact that in some countries there are several professions and even some occupations (e.g., police service) that require such expertise but that may not regarded as within the “legal profession.”


Distinct legal systems emerged relatively early in history, but legal professions of size and importance are relatively modern. There is not the slightest trace in ancient times of a distinct legal profession in the modern sense. The earliest known legal specialist was the judge, and he was only a part-time specialist. The chief, prince, or king of small societies discharged the judicial function as part of the general role of political leader. As his power spread, he delegated the function, though not to legal specialists; in the secular stages of the early systems, legal duties were taken over by royal officials who were “generalists.” In the wake of powerful religious or quasi-religious movements, priests or wise men often judged or advised the judges. It may be that in some of these cases specialized legal aid to the ordinary citizen did exist, but at levels of social status below the notice of chroniclers or tomb inscriptions and perhaps without benefit of official approval.

Classical beginnings

A distinct class of legal specialists other than judges first emerged in Greco-Roman civilization, and, as with the law itself, the main contribution was from Rome in the period from 200 bce to 600 ce. In the early stages of both Greece and Rome, as later among the German tribes who overran the Roman Empire, there was a prejudice against the idea of specialists in law being generally available for a fee. The assumption was that the citizen knew the customary law and would apply it in transactions or in litigation personally with advice from kinsmen. As the law became more complex, men prominent in public life—usually patricians—found it necessary to acquire legal knowledge, and some acquired reputations as experts. Often they spent periods serving as magistrates and in Rome as priests of the official religion, having special powers in matters of family law. Among the German tribes, noble experts were allowed to assist in litigation, not in a partisan fashion but as interpreters (Vorsprecher) for those who wished to present a case but felt uncomfortable doing so themselves. The peculiar system of development of early Roman law, by annual edict and by the extension of trial formulas, gave the Roman patrician legal expert an influential position. He became the jurisconsult, the first nonofficial lawyer to be regarded with social approbation, but he owed this partly to the fact that he did not attempt to act as an advocate at trial—a function left to the separate class of orators—and was prohibited from receiving fees.

The modern legal professional, earning his living by fee-paid legal services, first became clearly visible in the late Roman Empire, when the fiction that a jurisconsult received only gifts was abandoned and when at the same time the permissible fees were regulated. Changes in the methods of trial and other legal developments caused the jurisconsult to disappear in time. The orator, who now was required to obtain legal training, became the advocate. A subordinate legal agent of the classical system, the procurator, who attended to the formal aspects of litigation, took on added importance because later imperial legal procedure depended largely on written documents that the procurators produced. The jurisconsults had been important as teachers and writers on law; with their decline this function passed to government-conducted law schools at Rome, Constantinople, and Berytus (now Beirut) and to their salaried professors. There was also a humbler class of paid legal documentary experts, the tabelliones, who were useful in nonlitigious transactions.

Medieval Europe

This late Roman pattern of legal organization profoundly influenced the Europe that began to arise from 1000 ce after the barbarian invasions; even during the invasions the methods of Roman imperial administration never ceased to be used in some parts of southern France and in central Italy. The Christian church, which became the official Roman imperial church after 381 ce, developed its own canon law, courts, and practitioners and followed the general outline of later Roman legal organization. Because of its success among the invaders, the church was in a position to establish its jurisdiction in many matters of family law and inheritance. Hence, both the idea of a legal profession and the method of its operation retained sufficient force to offset Germanic and feudal objections to legal representation. After the revival of learning in the 12th century, in particular the renewed study of Roman law at Bologna, the influence of the late Roman professional system was greatly strengthened.

From then on, every country in continental Europe acquired, by various stages and with numerous local variations, a legal profession in which four main constituents could be observed. Procurators attended to the formal and especially the documentary steps in litigation. Advocates, who usually were university graduates in Romanist learning, gave direct advice to clients and to procurators and presented oral arguments in court. Among a miscellany of legal scribes, the notaries acquired importance because, in addition to being drafting experts, they also authenticated documents and maintained archives. University teachers of law took over the main task of explaining and adapting the mixture of Roman law and Germanic custom that produced the modern laws of the major European countries and continued to dominate in the scholarly interpretation of the law even after the 19th-century codifications. The relative importance of these classes varied enormously from place to place and from century to century. At times the teaching doctors almost supplanted the advocates; in some courts the procurators swallowed up the advocates, and in others the converse occurred; only the notaries managed to survive with little change.

England after the Conquest

England after the Norman Conquest of 1066 also was influenced by Roman example, and the clerics who staffed the Norman and Plantagenet monarchies and who provided the earliest of their judges enabled the notion of a legal profession, and especially of litigious representation, to be accepted. Only in the ecclesiastical and admiralty courts, however, did procurators (proctors) and doctors of the civil and canon laws become established as practitioners. The native “common law” was developed by a specialized legal society, the Inns of Court, in London; there, through lectures and apprenticeship, men acquired admission to practice before the royal courts. More particularly, they could become serjeants—the most dignified of the advocates, from whom alone after about 1300 the royal judges were appointed. Various agents for litigation resembling procurators also became known. The “attorneys,” authorized by legislation, at first shared the life of the Inns with the “apprentices” in advocacy, who themselves in time acquired the title of barrister. Indeed, there were cases of men working as both barristers and attorneys. When in the 16th century the Court of Chancery was established as the dispenser of “equity,” the appropriate agent for litigation was called a solicitor, but the common-law serjeants and barristers secured the right of advocacy in that court. It was not until the 17th century that the attorneys and solicitors were expelled from the Inns and the division between advocate and attorney became rigid, and not until the 18th century did the barristers accept a rule that they would function only upon being engaged by an attorney—not upon being retained directly by a client. Other types of legal agents also developed in England, but in the 19th century all of the nonbarristers were brought under the one name, solicitor. The order of serjeants was eliminated, leaving only barristers, of whom the most senior could be made Queen’s (or King’s) Counsel.

In its final development the English legal profession thus bore a resemblance to the European professions—particularly to that of northern France, where the parlements (courts) had a corporate life and apprentice training not unlike that of the Inns. But there were four significant differences between England and the Continent. No distinct class of university teachers and commentators on the national law developed in England. Development of the law took place chiefly through precedent based on the reported judgments of the courts, rather than through legislation. The continental monarchies also developed a system of career judicial office, in which the young university licentiate went straight into government service, whereas in England appointment of judges from the senior practicing profession remained the settled practice. In addition, the division between barristers and solicitors ultimately became much more rigid in England than did the division between the advocate and procurator on the Continent, which never adopted an equivalent of the English practice of requiring a barrister to be employed by a solicitor; both the procurator and the advocate were separately and directly employed by the client. Finally, England never developed the profession of notary, so that the whole burden of transactional work fell on those who are now the solicitors, with legal advice from the bar.

Worldwide legal profession

Contrary to conventional understanding, there were antecedents of a legal profession outside Europe prior to the spreading of such ideas through European colonialism. In China, for example, there was a long history of unofficial legal advisers—often young men preparing to take imperial examinations for official appointment—who assisted merchants and other laymen in the preparation of legal documents, including those needed to commence litigation. Although operating in the shadow of an imperial legal code that prohibited the instigation of litigation, these quasi-lawyers also enjoyed a fair measure of tolerance from officialdom, which suggests that at least some of them may have served a useful purpose.

Such indigenous developments notwithstanding, the rise outside Europe of a modern legal profession—in the sense of a class of specialists recognized by the state and yet operating with some measure of independence from it—is generally associated with European colonial expansion. In Britain’s North American colonies, and particularly in the United States soon after independence, lawyers assumed a prominent role in both public and private life, which led the French social observer Alexis de Tocqueville to write early in the 19th century that “it is at the bar or bench that the American aristocracy is found.” The English system also provided a model for most former English colonies in Africa, for most of the Indian subcontinent, and for Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Singapore. The Romano-Germanic practices that in time became the civil law made their influence felt in Scandinavia, eastern Europe, Latin America, and many Muslim countries in the Middle East; in French, Spanish, Belgian, and Portuguese colonies in Africa; and in Japan, Thailand, the French colonies of Southeast Asia, and, in some measure, the Republic of China (which existed on the Chinese mainland prior to 1949 and today exists on Taiwan). It should be noted, however, that the association between the modern legal profession and colonialism was not always felicitous. Although lawyers were in some instances at the forefront of their countries’ independence movements (as were Mohandas Gandhi in India and Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore), in other cases they worked to uphold colonial rule.

To be sure, both the common-law and the civil-law models of lawyering underwent considerable modification by both the countries of export and the countries of reception. In particular, the specialization of procurator-advocate and solicitor-barrister tended to be replaced by a “fused” profession of legal practitioners qualified to perform both functions and usually doing so. Such a fusion occurred gradually in Germany between the 16th and 18th centuries, and it has taken place more recently in France (except before the courts of appeal). Although the division still formally exists in Italy, it is no longer of practical importance. In Latin America the fused profession is general. Notaries as a separate specialized branch of the profession exist, however, in most civil-law countries.

Characteristics of the profession

Social role

The legal profession has always had an ambiguous social position. Leading lawyers have usually been socially prominent and respected—the sections of the profession so favoured varying with the general structure of the law in the particular community. The family status of early Roman jurisconsults may have been more important than their legal expertise in securing such a position, but by the time of the principate it was their legal eminence that made them respected. The English serjeants lived magnificently, especially in Elizabethan times, and the French Ordre des Avocats was established (14th century) by feudal aristocrats in circumstances reminiscent of early Rome—including an insistence on receiving gifts rather than fees. The early Italian doctors of civil and canon law (12th–15th centuries) were revered throughout Europe. In England and the countries influenced by its system, the highest prestige gradually came to be conferred on the judges rather than on the order of serjeants, of which the judges were members; even now, the judges of high-level courts in liberal-democratic common-law countries tend to enjoy appreciably greater respect than their brethren at the bar. In the Romano-Germanic systems it is the notaries and the advocates who have come to be most trusted or admired, the judiciary being more closely identified with the civil service.

Yet, along with this high repute, sustained over two millennia, lawyers have also engendered tremendous distrust and even hatred in many societies. In a few cases this has been the consequence of a general hostility to the whole idea of law. In the Soviet Union, for example, the early leaders (1917–22) imagined that law and lawyers were the instruments of the ruling classes and that law would soon wither away in classless communism (see Soviet law). This belief was revived during the first three decades of communist rule in China, especially during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). Further experience persuaded these governments that there was room for “socialist legality” and for lawyers to serve it. Indeed, since 1977 China has pursued the most ambitious program in history to develop a legal profession, though the legacy of the earlier era still makes itself felt in subtle ways.

There is an inherent conservatism to the legal profession, owing to its commitment to working chiefly through existing institutions and to the fact that law itself is predominantly intended to satisfy expectations arising from inherited patterns of behaviour. Individual lawyers, nevertheless, occasionally have been on the side of revolutionaries and rebels; Robespierre and Lenin were both lawyers, to cite two extreme cases. In addition, there is a long and rich tradition in many countries of lawyers’ serving as leaders of struggles for social justice, as did Gandhi, Thurgood Marshall in the United States, and Nelson Mandela in South Africa. The prevailing attitude of the legal profession, however, is one of moderation. Thus, many lawyers took the British side in the American Revolution, and, even among the lawyers who took the other side, the predominant influence was against any attempt to turn the political revolution into a socioeconomic revolution.

Along with these ideological and political reasons for popular distrust, and even more deep-seated, are the inherent difficulties associated with law and with some legal functions. Many people would like law to be so clear that its application is equally certain in all cases and so simple that any person of sense can readily see how it applies. But in a discipline sharing the imperfection and complexity of society itself, no such situation is attainable, and lawyers are consequently blamed for the basic difficulty of their craft—which, it must be said, they sometimes compound by multiplying obscurities, contradictions, and complexities. The legal function likely to be most distrusted by the average person—though it also produces some of the law’s heroes—is litigious advocacy, particularly in the criminal law. Plato and Aristotle condemned the advocate as one who was paid to make the worse cause appear the better or who endeavoured by sophisticated tricks of argument to establish as true what any person of common sense could see was false. The feeling against advocacy in the criminal law was so strong that, at least in cases involving more serious kinds of crime, a right to representation by a trained advocate was nowhere generally recognized until the 18th century.

The organized legal profession has in some jurisdictions endeavoured to meet the problem of litigious advocacy by contending that the dominant duty of the advocate is not to the client but to the truth and the law. Since the late Roman Empire, advocates in many countries have been required to take oaths to this effect, and lawyers have often technically been classed as “officers of court.” The duty of the advocate, so conceived, is to fight for the rights of his client, but only up to the point where an honourable person could fairly put the case on his own behalf. Others have agreed that, particularly in a highly adversarial legal system such as that of the United States, lawyers are obliged to advocate zealously for their clients, even if they disagree with the client’s position or views, provided that they neither misrepresent the law nor misstate the facts (see legal ethics).

Private practice

Client-directed lawyers often are called counselors, but in the original sense of that word—giving advice as to how the law stands—this is rarely an independent function; it is an inseparable part of other functions. In his client-directed activities the lawyer is concerned with how the law affects specific circumstances, which can for convenience be divided into two main types: transactional and litigious.

In the transactional type the lawyer is concerned with the validity or legal efficacy of a transaction independent of any immediate concern with the outcome of litigation. In most countries such activities constitute the largest area of lawyerly activity, whether considered with respect to the number of lawyers involved, the time spent on the task, or the number of clients affected. If the events constituting the transaction in question happen before the lawyer is consulted, he can only advise on their legal significance and perhaps suggest methods of overcoming legal deficiencies in what has been done. If future conduct is involved, he is better placed to help his client plan a course of action that will achieve the desired outcome in the most economical fashion that the law permits and in a manner that minimizes the chances of future litigation.

Transactions may concern words and acts, but characteristically they require the drafting of documents. In the Romano-Germanic systems these often require notarization. Typical activities falling in this category today include the following: transferring interests in land; transmitting property on death; settling property within a family; making an agreement (especially a commercial agreement of some complexity and duration); incorporating or dissolving a corporate entity; varying the terms on which a corporate entity is conducted (classes of shares, managerial rights, distribution of profits, etc.); and adjusting the ownership and control of property and income to comply with the requirements of taxation laws and minimize their impact on the property and income in question, to ensure the proper management of the assets and distribution of the proceeds among beneficiaries (as in estate planning), or both. In the Romano-Germanic systems many of these functions are discharged by notaries, and in the English and similar divided systems they are performed by solicitors, though in difficult situations the opinions of advocates or barristers may be obtained. In the fused professions of North America, some firms of attorneys, or departments within firms, specialize in business of this type and avoid, so far as they can, the litigious function.

The litigious function is subdivided into three main stages. First is the preparation of the case: interviewing the client and investigating the circumstances on the basis of leads provided by the client, attending to the formal requirements of the procedure in question—which may involve writs, summonses, and statements of claim or defense—and preparing for trial. Second is the trial proper, in which the facts and law are established and argued before the judge and a decision is made. Third is the execution of the judgment—payment of damages, delivery of property, or performance of obligation in civil cases; payment of fine or imprisonment, etc., in criminal cases. Similar stages arise on appeal. In the divided professions the sharing of these functions is intricate and varies between one system and another. The advocate or barrister is especially responsible for the second stage, but he may advise upon or draft many of the documents used in other stages. If incidental disputes concerning procedure have to be litigated, he is likely to conduct the proceedings; and, if the procedure includes a pretrial conference, he is likely to represent the client. Otherwise, the first and third stages are mainly the province of the procurator or solicitor.

Public-directed practice

Many law graduates choose to enter public service rather than private practice. Of the public roles played by members of the legal profession, that of judge is most visible, but the status of judge and the mode of entry into this branch of the profession vary considerably from country to country.

The traditional independence, power, creativity, and prestige of the Anglo-American judge contrast with the status of most Continental judges, which is more akin to that of civil servants, especially at lower levels of the judiciary. In the countries of Anglo-American influence, at least until recently, appointment (or, in some U.S. states, election) to a judgeship has been viewed as the crowning achievement of a long and often distinguished legal career. In the Continental countries, by contrast, a law graduate who wishes to be a judge merely completes a training period and passes an examination to get a job deciding cases. The beginning civil-law judge can expect to start at the lowest level and, like any other civil servant, to rise in the hierarchy through a series of promotions (though a modest number of positions on the highest courts are reserved for distinguished practitioners or professors as well as for career civil servants). Lateral entry into the judiciary at any level is uncommon. It has frequently been observed that, because of their standardized training, civil-law judges tend to share a common outlook. Moreover, because of their concerns about advancement, they tend to adopt a civil-service mentality that may appear, at least from an Anglo-American perspective, to discourage initiative and independence. Any tendency toward judicial individualism is apt to be further inhibited by the fact that Continental judges, even at the lowest levels, usually sit in panels and typically present their decisions in unsigned opinions. Except in a few courts, such as the German Federal Constitutional Court, disagreement among judges is generally not revealed, either in the form of a dissenting opinion or in a record of the judges’ votes.

Since the late 20th century, however, the contrast between Continental and Anglo-American judicial roles has diminished. In the United States the prestige of judgeships, except at the higher levels, has declined somewhat. It is not as unusual as it once was for judges to resign and return to private practice or for eminent lawyers to decline to be considered for judicial positions; relatively low judicial salaries and public scrutiny are often mentioned as key reasons. Meanwhile, in some Continental countries, such as Germany—as well as in other countries with similar systems, including South Korea and Japan—judges are recruited from among the best law graduates and sometimes from among experienced practitioners. Because of their special training, Continental judges are almost uniformly professional and competent.

Governments have always required legal specialists, and the scope for such employment today is enormous. Most countries have a senior political officer—minister of justice, attorney general, solicitor general—who by convention needs to be a lawyer, and a department concerned mainly with the legal problems of the government as client (in the English-derived systems usually the office of the attorney general). Increasingly, however, the great departments of state need their own legal subbranch. In some countries, such as Germany, lawyers dominate the higher offices in the civil service, while in others, such as Japan and France, the various official bureaus are more likely to be staffed, respectively, by law graduates not admitted to practice or by nonlawyers who have been trained in a special school of administration. In the formerly socialist countries of eastern Europe, most lawyers tended to work for government or for collectivized industrial and farm organizations.

One of the oldest and still most difficult of governmental legal functions is that of prosecutor. Prosecution is sometimes in part carried on by private persons acting through private lawyers, but the recent trend has very much been to concentrate the function in government legal officers. In most Commonwealth countries the crown, or public, prosecutor is a specialized officer under the general control of the attorney general. England has an independent “director of public prosecutions” concerned only with the most serious types of crime, but most prosecutions have been conducted by private barristers briefed by him or by the police. A 1985 law, however, provided for the establishment of a body of official prosecutors similar to the public prosecutors (procurators fiscal) of the Scottish system. In the United States this function has come to be mainly local, and prosecutors, whose most common title is district attorney, are elected for short terms.

In most civil-law systems prosecuting is a career service. In Italy and France the prosecutor is a member of the judiciary. Both prosecutors and judges receive the same training, and both may move from one role to the other in the course of their advancement in the civil service. In Germany, although the prosecutor is not technically a member of the judiciary, he is not strictly separate from it, and individuals move easily from one position to the other. In China considerable effort has been made in recent years to distinguish the functions of judge, prosecutor, and defense counsel, but these roles remain in an early stage of development.

The prosecuting function is particularly delicate because criminal prosecution can be used as an instrument of oppression and persecution, even where conviction is not obtained, and because in most systems prosecutors are expected to act with a degree of fairness and restraint not necessarily expected of the parties to civil litigation. Many Romano-Germanic systems employ officers who supervise the working of the courts, especially their criminal jurisdiction. This is the office of the “prosecutor general,” or “officer of justice”; a similar service existed in most of the socialist countries of eastern Europe.

Another branch of government, the legislature, usually requires legal assistance. Legislation needs to be expressed in language readily comprehensible by judges and lawyers and to be framed in harmony with the existing body of law. This requires the service of parliamentary draftsmen who are expert lawyers. A further specialized branch of advisory activity associated with legislation has become prominent—the law-reform commission or committee.

Teaching and scholarship

Since Roman times teaching and scholarship in the law have provided prominent roles in the legal profession. Until the 18th century, teaching of the English common law was vested exclusively in the Inns of Court, and a good deal of continental European teaching for professional practice—particularly in the case of notaries and procurators—was also professionally organized. Even university law teaching in Europe often involved interchange between practitioner and teacher, exemplified in such great figures as the French 18th-century teacher, advocate, and judge Robert Joseph Pothier, whose commentaries provided the foundation for the Napoleonic Code of civil law. Much law teaching in the new university law schools that sprang up in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Commonwealth in the 19th and 20th centuries was initially carried on part-time by attorneys, barristers, and judges, and some still is. Sir William Blackstone, the first holder of a chair of English law—the Vinerian professorship at Oxford—came from the bar and became a judge. Only in the 20th century did law teaching become a distinct, full-time profession, and then to a greater extent in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada than in many civil-law countries.

Teachers and practitioners in all countries contribute to a vast professional literature, comprising textbooks, practical manuals, theoretical monographs, and a periodical literature whose bulk is becoming almost as big a problem as the enormous number of reported judicial decisions that are consulted for guidance and precedent. Fortunately, the development of sophisticated computerized legal-information services and the Internet have greatly facilitated access to this literature, though they arguably contribute to what has been described as an excess of data. Civil-law judges have traditionally paid close attention to the views of legal scholars as expressed in general and specialized treatises, commentaries on the codes, monographs, law review articles and case notes, and expert opinions rendered in connection with litigation, though some commentators have suggested that the role of jurists is diminishing as law practice and the academy change, especially on the European continent. Persistent scholarly criticism often prompts reexamination of a legal doctrine and sometimes even leads to the abandonment of an established judicial position. In the Anglo-American systems, legal writing has certainly become influential, as indicated by the increase in citations to secondary sources in contemporary judicial opinions. Nonetheless, the degree of deference to academic opinion is in general appreciably less than in the Continental countries.

More About Legal profession

11 references found in Britannica articles

Assorted References

    role of

      Britannica Kids
      MEDIA FOR:
      Legal profession
      You have successfully emailed this.
      Error when sending the email. Try again later.
      Edit Mode
      Legal profession
      Tips For Editing




      Thank You for Your Contribution!



      Uh Oh


      Keep Exploring Britannica

      Email this page