Complaint Filed Over White House Press Secretary's Legal Credentials
Calling Yourself a Lawyer Is Not a Small Lie
When titles carry public trust, to claim them without proof is a kind of usurpation, and free people are right to demand an impartial reckoning rather than shrug and move on.
A government officer has, by several accounts, admitted failing the bar examination while still defending her habit of calling herself a lawyer; a civic group has in consequence petitioned the State Bar of California to inquire into this claim. I am struck less by the personalities than by the office and the title. A press secretary speaks for the magistrate; a lawyer speaks in the language of law. Both are modes of authority. When the same person joins them in one breast, and the public hears that the legal title may not be truly theirs, the question is not mere etiquette or vanity, but whether trust placed for public ends has been misdirected.
In my Second Treatise of Government I defined political power, in paraphrase, as a right to make laws with penalties only for the public good. Those who assist that power, whether by counsel or by speech, partake so far in it as they are believed to know the laws, to understand the rights of men, and to speak within some known rule. The word “lawyer” is not a charm but a sign. It signifies, in common use, more than having once worked among legal papers or in proximity to a law firm; it imports a settled competence, attested by some public rule, whereby the people may know who speaks with that authority and who does not.
Here I must insist, as I did in my Essay Concerning Human Understanding, that assent ought to be proportioned to the evidence. If the community has, by long practice, taken the passing of an examination and admission to a bar as the proof by which a man or woman is reckoned a lawyer, then to claim the name while having failed that test is to ask belief beyond one’s proofs. Perhaps the person so speaking persuaded herself that prior employments in a private equity concern or work upon international transactions sufficed. Yet private persuasion does not alter public standards. Words, if they are to guide action, must keep a steady meaning, not stretch to cover whatever any ambitious soul wishes them to cover.
Some will say that this is a trifling quarrel about labels, especially when the officer in question now holds a post whose principal function is to speak, not to plead causes in court. But the line between trifling and grave in public affairs often lies exactly where trust begins to fray. When a man once discovers that a title was used loosely, he begins to suspect that other assurances are but air. If one may adorn oneself with “lawyer” without the hard passage through the bar, why not with other appellations that command deference, and why should the audience treat any of them as more than ornament? Small usurpations of honour prepare the way for larger usurpations of power.
Still, I do not hastily conclude that such misrepresentation dissolves government or justifies rebellion. In the Treatise I allowed that the people have a right to resume their original liberty only upon a long train of abuses, all tending the same way, whereby the design to reduce them under arbitrary power is plain. One disputed title, though it touches upon the integrity of public speech, does not of itself amount to that train. The appropriate remedy in such a case lies not in tumult but in law: an impartial body, like this State Bar that is petitioned, inquiring whether its rules were broken, and pronouncing according to known standards, not according to favour or party.
Here the burden of proof, which always rests upon power and not upon liberty, lies in a clear place. If a public officer claims the credit that belongs to a regulated profession, and that profession is ordered for the protection of men’s lives, liberties, and estates, then either she must show that her claim answers the rule, or submit to correction. To let the matter pass because she already occupies a high station would be to make her a judge in her own case; to insist that the ordinary rule applies to her as to others is to remember that all are naturally equal, that no one is born with a right to superior titles, and that every superiority must be traced back to consent and law.
There remains some uncertainty in the reports, and I do not pretend to know every circumstance of this appointment or of the complaint laid before the bar. Yet even that ignorance makes the central point sharper. In well-ordered commonwealths, the people need not rummage through rumours to know who is truly a lawyer or a judge or a physician; they can look to fixed, public marks, guarded by bodies that answer to law, not to favour. If those marks are blurred, or if men grow careless about their defence, the decay begins not with riots in the street, but with quiet confusion over who, in fact, has a right to the titles that speak in the people’s name.
From the works cited
- Second Treatise of Government — Political power defined narrowly as the right to make laws, with penalties, only for the public good — anything beyond that definition must justify itself or stand condemned.
- Second Treatise of Government — Government by consent and majority decision, with the legislative supreme but itself bound: a fiduciary power, held on trust, forfeited by breach.
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding — Assent must be proportioned to the evidence; believing beyond one's proofs is a failure of duty, not a mark of faith.