What are lawyers for?

We all know lawyers’ commercial role, to be professional guides for human affairs. But we also need lawyers to bring the law’s guarantees to life for people and in society. And we need it right now.

Lawyers serve two purposes in society. I’m worried that the legal profession is not paying enough attention to one of them.

Let’s start with the better-known role of lawyers, the one that most people (and certainly most lawyers) are familiar with. For lack of an immediately better term, call it the “facilitator of human interactions.” In this role, lawyers guide people (and the commercial or institutional entities people create) as they make their way in the world — managing the effects, minimizing the harms, and maximizing the benefits of their activities in relation to others and to society.

One way to picture this is to envision society as an enormous body of water, and people as boats of various sizes plying their way around and through those waters. Some boats want to arrive together at the same port; others are vying for the sole available pier; and some just get in each other’s way. When you consider that there could be millions of those boats (some of them gigantic) sailing in every direction, and that the waters are frequently uncharted and treacherous, and that storms can erupt unexpectedly, then countless “interactions” are inevitable.

In this scenario, you could think of lawyers as expert navigators who can forecast the winds, understand the currents, and know all the underwater hazards. They can guide human crafts along the fastest or least risky or most profitable courses towards their destinations — and when collisions occur, they can help clean up the mess that results. Having a lawyer onboard increases the odds of a safe and successful voyage.

That’s a rough-and-ready way to think about one critical purpose of lawyers in society: as a professional intermediary and guide for human affairs. Almost everything you’ve ever hired a lawyer to do — or been hired as a lawyer to do — falls into this category. And it’s fair to say that the overwhelming majority of daily discourse within the legal profession — among lawyers, within law firms, in the legal press — concentrates almost exclusively on this facet of lawyers’ existence. In this respect, the answer to “What are lawyers for?” is “Whatever someone will pay us to do.”

Which is completely legitimate, of course. We’re all trying to keep roofs over our heads and food on our plates. I’d estimate that 80% of everything I’ve written over the last 20 years relates in whole or in part to the role of lawyers as professional intermediaries for hire — to their commercial role, essentially. It’s important, and it receives plenty of due attention.

But there’s another function lawyers perform, one that doesn’t come up in conversation nearly as often and that is, to my way of thinking, more important. To understand it, we need to pull the camera back and look at the purpose of lawyers in the broadest possible sense.

The question “What are lawyers for?” raises another, prior and more foundational question: “What is the law for?” We can’t talk about lawyers without involving the law — it’s right there in the first three letters, after all. And when we start to interrogate the purpose of the law itself, then we pretty quickly move beyond the commercial arena and start to grapple with some serious, society-defining matters.

I’m not a legal scholar, and I’ll never cosplay as one. But from my seat in the amateur ranks, the role of law in civil society is to articulate and codify the collective values and standards that we believe — or at least, that enough of our forebears once believed — should apply among members of the society and should govern their actions.

Law is a society’s way of providing people with a unifying framework for constructive co-existence. Law gives us a common vocabulary of rights and obligations, a shared structure for resolving conflict, and a collective aspiration towards fair dealing and human flourishing. These features of the law allow people to live together in ways that promote individual agency while still protecting the general interest — the pursuit of happiness within a system of peace, order, and good government, if you will.

But there’s more. The law also exists to regulate power in a society: to structure its distribution, create processes for its implementation, and place limits on its application. In a healthy society, power flows through the law, not around it. Certainly, we need to closely examine and evaluate those laws — the exercise of power through a biased or corrupted system will be illegitimate even if it’s “lawful.” But as a general rule, the law is available as a check on the arbitrary exercise of power, whether by a state authority or a private entity.

And above these two aspects of law’s societal role, I believe there’s also a third: to serve as a kind of “moral architecture” of society. Most people have a deep (if often inchoate) sense of right and wrong, one that moves them to assess events against what they regard as incontrovertible standards. Even in the most advanced civil society, the law can only hope to echo the real moral truths to which its members hold fast — but that’s often enough to give those laws a visceral legitimacy with most people.

So: a framework for peaceful co-existence, a structure for regulating power, and a blueprint for moral architecture, all for the purpose of advancing human achievement and safeguarding human dignity. That’s my answer to the question of what the law is for.

But you’ll notice that each of those three functions, on its own, is static. A framework just sits there. A process is merely an idea. A blueprint has never once put shovels in the ground. The law, on its own, is silent and still. The law is a noun, not a verb.

The law needs action. It requires an external force to pick it up, activate it, and put it to its intended use. And that, lawyers, is where you come in.

Lawyers have a commercial role of great importance. But as far as I’m concerned, it pales by comparison to lawyers’ societal role. And that function, put simply, is to bring the law to life — to activate and apply, animate and implement, embody and make real those moral blueprints and co-existence frameworks and human ideals. This is why we have lawyers: to rev up the law’s engine and light up its control panel and get it operating. We need lawyers to make law real and effective.

And I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that in our collective lifetime, we have never found ourselves in more dire need of this role. Because as you’ve probably noticed just by looking around, injustice is rampant, and democracies are buckling, and the world is figuratively (and in several places literally) on fire.

We’re currently experiencing the clear decline of democratic practices and the restriction of individual liberties and academic freedom in many western countries, especially the United States; the growing lawlessness and horrifying actions of regimes whose political systems are increasingly authoritarian or totalitarian; the rise of unconstrained corporate power, especially in the technology industry; and what has been colourfully but accurately described as the “enshittification” of power.

The law is our only real bulwark against these abuses, and lawyers are entrusted with the responsibility to activate the law’s power and mobilize its defences. I understand many lawyers’ hesitancy to get involved in these matters. The temptation is strong to keep our heads down, stick to our commercial role, and keep helping our clients navigate through choppy waters to safe destinations.

But the reality is that the environment in which lawyers operate has become dangerously unstable. Government and corporate interests are starting to dictate which boats get to sail on the water, and to which destinations. If lawyers fail to perform their societal function today, then it’s very likely there won’t be any commercial role left for them to play tomorrow.

Where can we begin? Look around and identify how the law is, or is failing to, properly and effectively operate in your community, city, or country. Think about ways in which, alone or in concert with some of your professional colleagues, you could locate just one single challenge to or violation of the rule of law in your vicinity, and take just one step today towards alleviating it. I think that’s the least that a lawyer can do to fulfill their societal role. But there is much, much more that can be done, for those prepared to pursue it.

Many of us, myself very much included, have been fortunate to live most of our lives in an extended era of peace and relative prosperity. Among many other things, that allowed lawyers to focus almost entirely on their commercial roles, with occasional public-interest activity and attention to greater justice needs. That era has ended. From now on, lawyers will be called upon to divide their focus between their two essential roles, both the commercial and the societal, keeping one foot firmly planted in each world.

There’s no more time to lose. In a time of widespread misinformation, alienation and lawlessness, we need clarity, reliability, and uprightness in the public square. We need lawyers to bring out the law.