Lawyers, gums, and rummies: why do we hate attorneys?

• Author: Olson, Walter

Few movie scenes of recent years have been bigger audience pleasers than the one in Jurassic Park where the dinosaur eats the lawyer. Audiences typically burst into laughter and cheers. Which raises the question: Do they react this way because Steven Spielberg has tainted their minds against this great profession, subtly planting the message that it's OK to laugh at attorneys? Or did Spielberg arrange his plot to get a lawyer munched like a cherry off the top of a sundae because he knew full well what would make audiences laugh and cheer? In other words, do lawyers have an image problem because Hollywood and the press keep picking on them, or do Hollywood and the press keep picking on lawyers because they know the public already has a low opinion of them?

The current unpopularity of lawyers has been the subject of much hand wringing and indignation on the part of the American Bar Association. In the ABA's view, the American public has been terribly misled about lawyers. If it only knew more about how they do their work, it would not be so upset. Its antipathy arises from false consciousness.

If the problem is bad public relations, then the solution must be better public relations. And so our bar establishment has labored mightily to come up with talking points about the good lawyers do. Among my personal favorites is the official slogan of the 1996 ABA national convention: "Freedom, Justice, Liberty - Without Lawyers They're Just Words." Or, to paraphrase slightly: Without lawyers, justice itself would be impossible. This slogan delights me because it calls to mind the slogan used by one of the big chemical manufacturers back in the 1970s, when terror about toxic substances was everywhere: "Without chemicals, life itself would be impossible." In a sense, of course, this point is very well taken: Without oxygen or water or salt we'd all be in big trouble. It's just that it may not seem very responsive to the grievance of someone who lives downstream from a factory dumping vinyl chloride.

You see similar arguments in the P.R. campaigns of other interest groups that find themselves unpopular at any given moment. "Without oil companies, driving itself would be impossible": equally true, and equally unsatisfying after a big tanker spill. Or try "without agribusiness, eating itself would be impossible" after an outbreak of food poisoning. The public is smart enough to recognize that whether there's going to be an oil industry is not really the...