White Collar by C. Wright Mills — Read

Both Tocqueville, near the beginning of the nineteenth century, and Bryce, near the end, thought the American lawyers' prestige was very high; in fact, they believed lawyers, as Willard Hurst puts it, to be a sort of ersatz aristocracy. Yet there has always been an ambiguity about the popular image of lawyers- they are honorable but they are also sharp. A code of professional ethics, it should be recalled, was not adopted by the American Bar Association until 1908, and even then did not really deal with the Bar's social responsibility.

Before the ascendancy of the large corporation, skill and eloquence in advocacy selected nineteenth-century leaders of the bar; reputations and wealth were created and maintained in the courts, of which the lawyer was an officer. He was an agent of the law, handling the general interests of society, as fixed and allowed in the law; his day's tasks were as varied as human activity and experience itself. An opinion leader, a man whose recommendations to the community counted, who handled obligations and rights of intimate family and life problems, the liberty and property of all who had them, the lawyer personally pointed out the course of the law and counseled his client against the pitfalls of illegality. Deferred to by his client, he carefully displayed the dignity he claimed to embody. Rewarded for apparent honesty, carrying an ethical halo, held to be fit material for high statesmanship, the lawyer upheld public service and was professionally above business motives.