From the Courthouse to the White House
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If we heeded the advice in Shakespeare s Henry VI the first thing we do, let s kill all the lawyers we might find ourselves without a president in 2009.
More than half of all American presidents including both Adamses, Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson, FDR and Nixon were attorneys, as in all likelihood our next president will be.
Six of the seven leading candidates for president from both parties hold law degrees: former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Sen. Fred Thompson (Tenn.) and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney on the Republican side, and Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.), as well as former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, on the Democratic side. (Technically speaking, Thompson is not yet a declared candidate.)
The study or practice of law played an important role in the careers of all of these presidential hopefuls, albeit in extremely diverse ways. The centrality of these legal experiences allows us to understand the interplay between the bar and the White House, and between law and politics generally.
Start with Giuliani: Before becoming America s Mayor, he served as the U.S. attorney for Manhattan. A law review editor and 1968 graduate of the New York University School of Law, he clerked for a federal judge and later joined the U.S. Attorney s Office.
After a detour into private practice and the Ford and Reagan Justice Departments, Giuliani ascended in 1983 to the top U.S. attorney post, where he successfully prosecuted major mafia family heads and high-profile white-collar criminals. These law enforcement efforts drove his victorious mayoral campaign of reducing the city s atmospheric crime rate.
Thompson, too, cut his political teeth through practicing law. He graduated from Vanderbilt University Law School in the late 60s and first came to prominence as counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee, where he helped uncover President Nixon s infamous tapes.
Thompson later returned to Tennessee to another high-profile political case, representing a former Tennessee Parole Board chairwoman who was dismissed by the governor after she exposed his role in a cash-for-clemency scandal. And perhaps most famously, Thompson has played Manhattan District Attorney Arthur Branch for five years on Law Order.
Best-known for his success in the business world, Romney earned both an MBA and a JD from Harvard in 1975. Though Romney has not formally practiced law during his career, his legal knowledge reportedly was a significant asset in his private equity work at Bain Capital.
And his efforts at erasing the Salt Lake City Olympics stain of corruption depended as much on a careful legalistic understanding of International Olympic Committee regulations as on the business acumen that restored corporate sponsorships.
On the Democratic side, two of Clinton s most significant life experiences meeting her future husband and practicing in Little Rock s Rose Law Firm wouldn t have occurred but for her decision to pursue the law. She met eventual president Bill Clinton when both began their studies at Yale Law in the early 70s; they married soon after graduation.
In 1979, Hillary became the first-ever female partner at the Rose Law Firm and was later listed among the 100 most influential lawyers in America achievements that were obscured by the scandals arising from her tenure at the firm, including the Whitewater affair and the death of Vince Foster, one of her former law partners.
Obama entered Harvard Law School in 1988 and in 1990 was elected the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, an event lavishly reported by national newspapers.
After earning his JD in 1991, Obama decamped for Chicago, where he spent several years practicing civil rights law and representing community organizers at a Windy City firm. He also lectured in constitutional law at the University of Chicago, where he earned praise from colleagues such as professor Cass Sunstein.
Finally, Edwards unapologetically launched his political career from the platform of the personal injury bar. A graduate of the University of North Carolina Law School, Edwards worked his way up through law firm life, handling mostly medical malpractice plaintiffs cases.
In 1993, he founded his own firm and ultimately earned a reputation as the top plaintiffs attorney in North Carolina. He won the largest personal injury award in the state s history in a case involving a defective swimming pool drain. He was later given a national award by the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (now the American Association for Justice).
So what common themes hold together these wildly divergent legal experiences? Why are attorneys peculiarly equipped to shoulder the burdens posed by the presidency?
For starters, a legal education trains the mind to approach and resolve dilemmas in a very particular way. Students slowly absorb a massive ocean of concepts and are then given a hypothetical problem requiring the precise deployment of that theoretical knowledge. Presidential candidates must also assimilate the specifics of thorny policy issues with their larger political and philosophical perspectives.
Second, the study of law demands intellectual vigor, quick thinking, eloquence and the willingness and ability to debate even the most esoteric issues; legal practice requires similar skills and energy. No surprises, then, that some of the best performers in presidential debates are attorneys.
But perhaps most importantly, the attorney-client relationship seems especially well-suited to public service. Lawyers serve their clients: Whether the client is a corporation, the people, the government or an individual, attorneys are ethically and professionally bound to vindicate interests vigorously and fairly. Thus, many attorneys find quite natural the adjustment to serving the public in politics.
Of course, the best attorneys not only are the most responsive to their clients but also are capable of telling them when they re wrong, why they ll lose a case and how to fix the situation. So, too, the most effective public servants can see beyond opinion polls and exercise true leadership.
So instead of killing the lawyers, perhaps we should learn from them. After all, there s a better-than-odds chance our next president will be one.
Michael M. Rosen is an attorney in San Diego.
I am absolutely sick over the fact that we will likely elect a lawyer to lead our nation in 2008. It is a shame! We owe the nation better. And I mean that on both sides of the aisle. The business of America is business, not the courtroom. We have too many lawyers now living a double life as vultures picking at the body politic and the citizenry. Its an embarrassment. You don't see this in most foreign countries, but only in America. Increasingly lawyers are running our government and writing laws that perpetuate our reliance on legal representation in every facet of our lives. Its like our government is dedicated to a "full-employment for lawyers" crusade. They write laws that have so many loopholes and "exemptions" that it ensures that to "get a fair shake", you have to hire a lawyer to look after your interests. We need to stop this! Shakespear had it right in Henry VI.
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