The Complete Lawyer

“This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius” – from the 1967 musical Hair.

While no doubt dating myself, I recall this rather sappy song being an anthem for a certain segment of my generation during our coming of age. It represented a push back against a countervailing force in our culture, the one that enshrined the buck as the ultimate display of worth, honored masculine hubris as the finest demonstration of strength and resisted change as a descent into chaos. Although this characterization may be thought extreme (consider in our own legal culture the continued consternation over law as a “business” rather than a “profession”) recent concerns are being expressed by (male) law students that non-doctrinal courses represent the feminization of the legal education. Others resist the wide array of professional and academic changes taking place—away from hourly billing, Socratic instruction, and zealous advocacy for and recognition of only one interest in a dispute, to name a few.

To be sure, the “Aquarian” 1960’s represented an extreme in our heritage of experimentation and continual re-invention. While at times veering into self absorption, this impulse has also inspired the creative engine that attracted many millions to our shore from old, atrophied societies. The recent election of Barack Obama is emblematic of the uniquely American ability to shed the old and imagine a different future.

This tendency has been with us from the beginning, notes David Reynolds in Waking Giant, his masterful history of the U.S. during the age of Jackson. He depicts a roistering time that brought stunning accomplishments in engineering (the Erie Canal and steam engine); the arts (the achievements of Poe, Hawthorne, Thoreau and Melville who helped define American literature); religion (the rise of scores of home-grown religious prophets and communities, chief among them Joseph Smith and the Mormon Church); and the political ascendancy, with Jackson’s election, of “the people” over the moneyed classes. Virtually nothing we experience now is without precedent in those times. John Quincy Adams expressed paranoia that was positively Nixonian in its intensity. The media was so overtly biased that present carping over Fox News and The New York Times is yawningly predictable. The “class war” of today is just a repeat of the fight between Jackson’s Democrats and the US Bank. The love affair (among some) with Sarah Palin’s hockey mom frontierism and moose-dressing doesn’t stray from the throngs of 1840 who voted for Harrison because he was a regular guy, born in a log cabin.

The constant theme of reinvention and the overturning of atrophied habits of thought and practice runs like a steel thread throughout our history. Innovation, intellectual freedom and a willingness to explore a different (and perhaps better) path is part of our national character. Also enduring is the thread of institutional conservatism. While some sang about Aquarius in the ‘60’s, a governor (and later conservative icon) was promising to crush the Berkeley protesters; adults were increasingly angry about the generation gap with their kids who said, “Don’t trust anyone over 30″; the solid South rejected a Democratic party they believed had abandoned them for a civil rights movement and all the while, the huge engine of business dwarfed the economies of every other country. This is, after all, a wealthy and conservative culture.