Simple Images and Complex Realities: English Lawyers and Their Relationship to Business and Politics, 1750–1950

Abstract

Are lawyers professionals, constrained by public-service limitations on their work, or free-wheeling business people? So the current debate surrounding professionalism versus commercialism is articulated. All too often this controversy is grounded in overdrawn dualisms, a sort ofGemeinschaft-Gesellschaft: a golden age of the lawyer as public servant that has given way to the ethics of the marketplace. The starting point of this essay is that this way of thinking about the work of lawyers is unhelpful, as it encourages a belief in stark divisions between a pure realm of “lawyering” and the grubby world of “business,” and between the “public” and the “private” dimensions of lawyers' work. In practice, both lawyering and business and the public and private fields of lawyering are, and probably always have been, imbricated within each other. This article seeks to demonstrate this coalescence from historical materials.