Calling Yourself a Lawyer When You Are Not

A newly appointed press secretary has lately admitted failing the bar examination while defending her habit of calling herself a lawyer. A watchdog group has asked the bar of a great commercial state to inquire into these claims; a celebrated television host has pressed her upon them. The facts before us are simple: she worked among lawyers in a private equity and international transactions setting; she has enjoyed the aura of legal expertise; she did not, however, obtain the public qualification that the law itself has laid down. The question is not whether she is clever, industrious, or quick of speech, but whether the character of her conduct can be reconciled with the demands of justice and of honest dealing in public life.

When I wrote of the impartial spectator in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, I supposed an observer who is at once well informed and disinterested, neither dazzled by rank nor soured by envy. How would such a spectator judge one who, having failed the appointed trial of a profession, nonetheless claims its title? He would distinguish, I think, between the useful variety of experience—which may include years spent in a law office—and the very particular pretension to be of the profession itself. To say, “I worked among lawyers,” is to describe a fact; to say, “I am a lawyer,” is to claim a public trust. The former may invite respect; the latter, if unearned, invites resentment.

In all professions, but especially in those that touch property, liberty, and reputation, society has prudently erected formal barriers—examinations, oaths, and licences—not to flatter the vanity of the successful, but to give the public a cheap and intelligible assurance. The labouring poor cannot investigate every surgeon’s skill or every advocate’s acuteness; they rely on a visible badge that some trial has preceded authority. To appropriate that badge without passing through the trial is to take what does not belong to one, not by open force but by a species of quiet fraud. It is less violent than robbing on the highway, but it belongs to the same family of injuries, for it lives by the confidence of those who are unable to scrutinize.

Self-love, which in markets may, under proper laws, promote the general good, here operates upon a different theatre. The allure of being thought a lawyer is evident: higher status, greater deference in argument, a readier passage into office. The costs are more obscure and fall chiefly upon others. The public, hearing the word “lawyer,” supposes years of discipline ratified by an impartial examination; colleagues defer where they might otherwise inquire; journalists and citizens alter their beliefs in reliance upon a character they imagine and which does not in fact exist. The individual pockets the whole premium of the false reputation; the losses are divided, and therefore silently borne, by a great multitude who never know they have paid.

One might plead, in mitigation, that the person so speaking has performed legal work, has been styled an associate by firms, has drafted memoranda which genuine lawyers perhaps signed. Yet here the impartial spectator must again intervene. Apprentices in a workshop may shape parts of a watch without being called watchmakers; clerks in a counting house may handle gold without being deemed bankers. In every trade there are those who assist and those who are entrusted; the title belongs to the latter because they bear the publicly recognized responsibility. To confound these roles is to turn the division of labour, which is a source of clarity and improvement, into a fog of ambiguous pretension.

In The Wealth of Nations I observed that we often obtain the cooperation of others by addressing not their benevolence but their interest. Institutions ought, therefore, to be framed on the presumption that most people, most of the time, will follow the path that joins their advantage to what the law allows and public opinion applauds. If the temptation to exaggerate or fabricate credentials brings little risk, we should not wonder that it recurs in public employment as in commerce. A scheme of trust which depends for its preservation upon unusual virtue is ill-contrived; a modest degree of self-command can be expected of ordinary people, but not the heroism of saints.

The remedy is not a new inquisition into hearts, but a more exact guardianship of names and offices. When a bar association receives a complaint of false claims, it ought to inquire with seriousness, not out of professional jealousy, but from regard to the public who depend upon the meaning of words. When appointing authorities weigh candidates for posts that rest upon credibility, they should verify the plain matters of fact which a schoolboy can now invent and a busy minister neglect. The liberty and opulence of a great nation rest less upon clever speeches than upon a slow, steady commerce in truth; when titles become ornaments to be assumed rather than trials to be passed, the whole edifice begins, almost imperceptibly, to rot from within.

To be loved without being lovely, I once wrote, is of little real value; so too, to be esteemed as a lawyer without being one brings, at best, the shadow of honour without its substance, and at worst corrodes the very trust that makes honour possible at all.