All things went as planned, and I spent this past week in Boise, Idaho, getting inducted into what the Supreme Court of the United States has called “a broad monopoly . . . to do things other citizens may not lawfully do.” That is, I received a license to practice law in the state of Idaho.

A few weeks before Thursday’s admission ceremonies, I was tipped off, by LII director Thomas Bruce, about a book I probably would not have otherwise picked up: Andrew Abbott’s The System of Professions. This book describes Abbott’s thorough, international study of how professions emerge, then grow or die. The study includes an examination of the legal professions of Britain and America between 1880 and 1940, done to illustrate how professions protect their “jurisdictions” from the equally-abled but unordained. Abbott, in fact, compares the legal profession’s competitors to the common people of old Europe and other “people without history,” in that both have been “usually ignored in official mythologies” or “occasionally recalled as precursors, charlatans, or worse.” Thus, just as people’s historians are left only with records of riots from which to deduce commoner sentiment, Abbott had to find the stories of lawyers’ competitors lingering in the “careful records” that the organized legal profession has kept about “poachers”—those accused of “unauthorized practice of law.”

Abbott uses his data, from 60 years of unauthorized practice complaints, to tell the story of how the legal profession has grown itself a public monopoly and steadfastly protected it from accountants, bankers, notaries, foreign lawyers (both out-of-state and out-of-country), the disbarred, and the defunct American “conveyancers,” a group that used to have a monopoly over will and deed drafting. As to the conveyancers, Abbott dug up this anecdote to show just how effective the organized bar in the U.S. has been at taking over certain fields of professional work:

[W]hen the Pennsylvania Bar Association’s brand-new unauthorized practice committee reported in 1932, its chairman, a Philadephia suburban lawyer, asserted that “the Committee feels that the writing of wills is the practice of law.” W.G. Littleton of Philadephia rose to his feet and thundered:

Is it not a fact that the writing of wills is not only not the practice of the law but in the English system lawyers themselves were not permitted to draw wills until the year 1760 . . . and when I come to speak, my mind running back personally as far back as 1885, when I was thrown in with that class of men who were known as conveyancers, who prepared deeds, mortgages, and other legal instruments, and wrote wills, it would be perfectly astonishing to the lawyer of the day to say that members of the conveyancers’ association, whose names you probably know, some of whom I recollect, were violating any law.

Abbott’s history stops in 1940, and so he doesn’t treat the rise (and semi-legitimization) of paralegals and jailhouse lawyers in the 1970s. Still, even the shorter history that Abbott provides is enough to leave you, as Tom Bruce puts it, “completely confused about who’s a lawyer and who isn’t.”

And, in case it’s not clear, the bar’s monopoly on the practice of law is a significant fact to those interested in public/community legal education. In a later entry, perhaps, I can highlight some of the conflicts that have arisen between the bar and community lawyers and PLE providers in the U.S. and Canada over the past half-century. For now, though, I’ll end with a related and polemical quotation from Fred Rodell, former dean of the Yale Law School:

In tribal times, there were the medicine-men. In the Middle Ages, there were the priests. Today there are the lawyers. For every age, a group of bright boys, learned in their trade and jealous of their learning, who blend technical competence with plain and fancy hocus-pocus to make themselves masters of their fellow men. For every age, a pseudo-intellectual autocracy, guarding the tricks of its trade from the uninitiated, and running, after its own pattern, the civilization of its day. . . . . The legal trade, in short, is nothing but a high-class racket.

Hello from inside the racket.