Now you're thinking like a lawyer.

• Author: Kinsley, Michael
• Position: The Culture of Institutions

This piece appeared in 1975.

The popularity of legal careers requires no elaborate explanation. Lawyers run the country.

As a matter of fact, almost every major political reform of the past decade-with the significant exception of no-fault auto insurance-has had the important side effect of increasing business for lawyers. The Tax Reform Act of 1969 is known in professional circles as the "lawyers and accountants relief act," because of the wide areas of complicated litigation it opened up. The same could be said of the Freedom of Information Act, the campaign spending reform act, and the acts creating new regulatory commissions, such as the Environmental Protection Agency.

It would be absurd to suspect that this common feature of such disparate reforms-all associated with what has come to be called the "public interest law movement"-is the result of a conspiracy led by Ralph Nader and Senator John Tunney, secretly financed by the American Bar Association. But it would be equally absurd to write it off as a coincidence. It is actually the result, not of any overt conspiracy but of a process taught at all law schools across the country and known as "thinking like a lawyer." Thinking like a lawyer means believing that legal tools-primarily the adversary system-are ideally suited to solving all problems.

What the adversary system does is pit two sides against one another, with self-interest motivating their lawyers less toward the pursuit of truth and justice than toward the pursuit of victory. Between the lawyers stands a judge, who in the dominant tradition of American law is not a seeker after truth or justice either but rather a neutral referee seeking only to ensure that combatants obey the rules of fair play.

It is possible for disputes to be handled otherwise-by judges who do seek justice and truth (as they do in England in at least some cases), who keep lawyers out of their courtrooms and take responsibility themselves for protecting each party's rights (as they do in a few American small claims courts). It is also possible for disputes to be handled by mediators who seek solutions that are fair to both sides and that will enable the disputants to go forward as friends rather than enemies.

But lawyers are doing very little to encourage any solution of disputes outside the adversary system. When the Los Angeles County Bar Association attempted to provide arbitration of disputes between attorneys and their clients, the lawyers refused...