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5 The Corporate Profession Backgrounds, Training, and Practice Do you know, my dear boy . . . that in our society there are three men, the priest, the doctor, and the lawyer, who cannot appreciate the world? They wear black robes perhaps because they are in mourning for all virtue and hope. The unhappiest of the three is the lawyer. When a man seeks out the priest, he is moved by repentance, by remorse, by passionate beliefs that elevate him . . . But when he comes to us, the lawyers, we see the same ill feelings repeated again and again, never corrected. Our offices are gutters that cannot be cleansed. Honoré de Balzac, S S Colonel Chabert (1832) In a society that every day runs further afield from the end to which it has been destined by our Father, among the rumblings of a corrupt generation that claims to exercise rights that do not belong to it, between a reckless adventurer that tramples over a weak-spirited soul, between the power of gold that threatens to buy justice to be used against a poor sot without resources unable to assert his rights, rises the figure of the lawyer. Face to face with the image of justice, with one hand he points to the law and with the other he draws a circle upon which the sword of the magistrate falls. Manuel Angelon, S S The Defense Lawyer (1853) The most important and terrible plague of Spain is the proliferation of a massive gang of young lawyers, who can be supported only by a fantastic quantity of lawsuits. Questions multiply in proportion to demand. Even so, many still cannot find work. Given that a gentlemanly jurist cannot dedicate himself to plowing fields or be bothered to sit down and weave, we are left with a brilliant squadron of loafers, full of pretensions, who inflate the demand for state jobs, shake up politics, and engender The Corporate Profession  152 S revolutions. They must earn their daily bread somewhere. It would be even worse if there were lawsuits for them all. Benito Pérez Galdos, S S Doña Perfecta (1876) Lawyers faced frequent criticism asaresultoftheirenviablesuccess . A conspicuous number of adages reflected popular wisdom and prejudice . Some are innocuous, offering practical advice or poking innocent fun: “To the lawyer, one tells the truth.” “If you think you have fooled the doctor, the confessor, or the lawyer, you are fooling yourself.” “The lawyer of the peasant gets paid beans.” “With lawyers and patience, one wins the sentence.” “Thethreemostuntidythings:thetheologian’sconscience,thedoctor’stable, the lawyer’s testament.” “The lawyer and the comic actor will play the devil as often as the saint.”1 Others are predictably scathing: “To speak much without saying anything is the genius of the lawyer.” “Lawsuit finished, only the lawyer has won.” “The doctor, a Christian; the lawyer, a pagan.” “The doctor to prescribe, the barber to cure, and the lawyer to cheat.” “Good lawyer, bad neighbor.”Nottobeforgottenistheonemostoftenrepeatedtoday:“Lawyers and proctors, hand in hand, straight to hell.”2 It is difficult to trace the origins of an oral tradition, but, by their tone and content, many of these appear to have come down from the nineteenth century or even earlier. Novelists also tapped into public outrage over the comportment of a profession sworn to uphold the principles of justice and to defend the poor for free but who often seemed bent on the naked pursuit of profit. No Catalan, or any continental author for that matter, wrote an equivalent of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53), a punishing attack on the atrocious state of English justice, but Benito Pérez Galdós—often referred to as the “Spanish Dickens”—did take aim at lawyers in one novel. In Doña Perfecta (1876), a young civil engineer with progressive ideas returns from university to his ruralhometown inCastilewith ambitious plansfor dams,bridges, andirrigation canals only to find the town plagued by priests, lawyers, and lawsuits. In a Manichaean contest, he vies for the hand of an heiress to an agrarian estate against a reactionary lawyer who apprentices in the town’s most prestigious office. In the final scene, the heiress’s mother sees to it that the engineer is killed, which predictably sends her daughter to a sanatorium rather than to the lawyer’s arms. The allegory is not hard to interpret: priests and lawyers lamentably dominated Spanish public and private life, while men of science were considered threatening. Barcelona had no shortage of engineers, but [13...

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