NY law prof is calling on ‘Lawyer Nation’ to reform

Episode Notes

Transcript

Lee Rawles:

Welcome to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host, the ABA Journals. Lee Rawles, and today I’m joined by Ray Brescia author of the Book Lawyer Nation, the Past, present, and Future of the American Legal Profession. Ray, thank you so much for joining us.

Ray Brescia:

Thank you so much, Lee Thanks for having me.

Lee Rawles:

That is a very sweeping title, and I would love for you to talk about how you decided that this book needed to be written and what the scope of it is.

Ray Brescia:

It is a sweeping title, and I’d like to think that it’s a sweeping book as well. What the book tries to do, what I was trying to do with the book was to look at the current state of the American legal profession and the crises that I think it faces at present, and then to try to think about those crises in the context of the history of the profession and trying to look at both what has the profession done in the past when it has faced similar crises, and were there a series of crises? Was there ever a time when there was a series of crises like I think we face now, and to see how the profession faced them at any time in its past? And I think we have not done a good job as a profession in dealing with crises, and I believe that the time that is most analogous to the present situation is the turn of the 19th to the 20th century.

And so I really dig into that period and by digging into that period, I believe I sort of, my case is we created the modern and even contemporary legal profession at that time, and the institutions we put in place at that time very much continued to define the profession today. And I believe that it was the failings of those institutions that in some ways have led us to the state the profession is in now. So I could talk about any of those things that you would like, the current crises, what those crises were back then, what the institutions were, so we could go whatever direction you want to take it in.

Lee Rawles:

Oh, well, we definitely are going to be digging into all those things, but for my listeners, as they’re listening to you speak, they may be interested in this in many of these topics, but not know where you’re coming from about it. So can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you started studying this issue and becoming so involved in it that you have produced Lawyer Nation?

Ray Brescia:

Oh, thank you. That’s a great question. It really is. This book for me is in many ways a culmination of 30 years combined practice, and within that time, 15 years as a practicing lawyer, 15 years roughly in academia. And my background as a practitioner was in nonprofit organizations, mostly in New York City, although I worked for a year in New Haven, Connecticut, but most of my time as a practitioner was in New York City. I worked for the largest public interest law firm in the world short of the US Department of Justice, which is the Legal Aid Society of New York. And then I had a period when I clerked for a judge in the Southern District of New York, Constance Baker Motley, and then spent a good chunk of time about nine years as a lawyer and supervising attorney at the Urban Justice Center in New York City and in that work at Urban Justice Center at Legal Aid at New Haven, mostly representing low income tenants and tenant associations in housing matters, but also did work on workers’ rights projects and representing nonprofits.

So my practice experience certainly informs my work, particularly my discussion in the book of the Access to Justice Crisis, the fact that too many Americans face their legal problems without a lawyer. But then some of the historical analysis, which really makes up the first nearly half of the book, which is looking at the history of the American legal profession leading to that critical period at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. That’s really a product of my scholarly pursuits and I teach legal ethics and federal civil procedure and nonprofit law. And so in many ways, this book is a sort of a melding of my practice experience and my work as a scholar. And through all of that, believing that the American legal profession has a critical role to play in American culture and government and society and community, and wanting to make sure that it continues to play that significant role in the future. Because I fear that if the justice system serves only the people who can afford justice or that system is used to subvert democracy, I don’t know that we will continue to have a nation and a community that honors the rule of law where lawyers play a pivotal role in making sure that we do honor the rule of law. So in many ways, how did I come to this? It’s a combination of my work as a practicing lawyer and my research pursuits as a academic and law professor.

Lee Rawles:

Well, just so you know, and listeners who may not be familiar with my career, I have worked for the ABA Journal for 13 years and the ABA Journals flagship magazine, the American Bar Association, and we have editorial independence. But I have worked with and among ABA Journal people for all that time and in my more than 10 years reporting on the legal community and specifically incredibly well-meaning people within the ABA people who come to the various conferences. It’s not that the legal community thinks there’s nothing wrong. People know, they feel very uneasy about the state of the profession. They feel uneasy about access to justice issues. And I think that there are so many people who care very deeply but don’t know how we can get past the inertia. And I think that you probably will agree with me that legal professionals, they’re cautious people and the ship does not turn quickly. What do you see as the major stumbling blocks for the legal profession looking at, okay, well here are the current problems and then trying to address the problems. It’s not like no one wants to, it’s not like no one’s trying to, why aren’t we able to make headway or have we not been able to make as much headway as we need to? Well,

Ray Brescia:

I think that lawyers certainly get a bad rap. I don’t intend to through this book contribute to that, but I think that we do have a lot of challenges and a lot of things that the profession as a profession needs to address to get its house in order and to make sure it continues to play a really important role in American democracy. And that’s really what I try to point out in the book is that lawyers have been central to American democracy since its birth. And so I do think that lawyers as a class, if you would, are slow to change, are conservative. If you think about the things that we work with. We work with precedents, which are things from the past that Cast a shadow over the present and the future. And we have been slow to change. And I think looking at the different crises that the profession has faced over the last 130 years or so, it could be the Watergate crisis, it could be the SNL scandal with lawyers at its center.

Oftentimes the cure is very weak, and usually we go back to business as usual. But what I want to do, and I led in the six crises that I identify, I led with the Covid crisis as a crisis that the profession faced and as everyone in the world faced. But I led with that intentionally as one of the crises that the profession has faced and continues to face in some ways precisely because we changed in response to, we changed how we did business top to bottom in response to the pandemic. And if you had polled lawyers and judges and partners at law firms and law professors on January 1st, 2020, when is the legal profession going to operate in a more flexible way? When are we going to allow lawyers to work from home more? When are we going to allow simple matters before judges to be dealt with through video conference rather than making lawyers, three lawyers on a side in a multi-party case, fly across country for a 10 minute conference with a judge?

When are we going to see change in the profession with respect to allowing junior lawyers, senior lawyers who want to work more from home, who you know, trust they’re going to do their job? When are we going to see change in the profession such that lawyer schedules will be more flexible, that court processes will be more accessible? If you had pulled folks four years ago, leaders in the profession, I would guess that many of them would say, yeah, we’re never going to see any significant change in the way lawyers practice. Well, all that would change three months later, right when the profession changed because it had to in light of the public health crisis. And lo and behold, the sky did not fall. Law firms, nonprofits, courts went to virtual communications. For some people that was difficult. I will agree a hundred percent. But some found, I think many found that having more flexibility, having more inability to take their kids to school and pick them up at school and log off for 20 minutes when they had to run and get their kids from school or someone with a mobility impairment or anxiety disorder who had a difficult time showing up in the office and being in big meetings in person throughout the day, a lot of people did okay.

And again, the sky did not fall for litigants. They could check in with the court on a specific time, a 15 minute window, your case is going to get heard, rather than losing a whole day of work to go in and sit in court all day and maybe talk to a court clerk for two minutes, and the lawyer on the other side says, oh, no, no, I need an adjournment. And then, okay, three weeks later, they’re back at court losing a whole day of work. So I start with the covid and the way that the profession changed, the way it does practice in light of that pandemic to show that actually the profession might actually be more flexible than historically is believed itself to be. There are downsides to all of that. We can talk about it, but that’s a key point I tried to make.

Lee Rawles:

That has been a sentiment that’s come up again and again when I’ve talked to people. Interestingly, I think judges felt very freed in many ways after the pandemic when they realized, oh, I don’t necessarily have to do things in my Courtroom the way it was taught to me in the eighties or nineties when I first joined the bench. I can change. I can try things. So I would agree, I think that the pandemic did open people’s eyes to the idea that things can change. But I do think that when we look at how things can change, it does help as you’ve done in the book, to go back and look, how did we get here? And we’re going to go deeper into that after we hear a word from our advertisers.

Welcome back to the Modern Law Library. I’m here with Ray Brescia, author of Lawyer Nation, the Past, present, and Future of the American Legal Profession, and we are going to talk a little bit about the past. I was really interested when I opened the book and had a little bit of the Will Ferrell from Elf, I know them on the chapter about the ABA in the turn of the century. The Association started out as a very protectionist Association. It did not allow black members, it did not allow women. It was very exclusionary. And I don’t know necessarily that many people understand how that history of exclusion back in that time period, there are still remnants of the system that are based upon that. And I would love to hear more from you about that legacy, how we may not realize that this is the purpose behind some of the regulations, but this is what the people were thinking of in 1904 or whenever it was that they were getting together in Sarasota to write some of these rules. So we’d love to hear you talk a little bit about that.

Ray Brescia:

Well, I don’t mean to correct you, but ABA was founded in Saratoga Springs.

Lee Rawles:

Oh, not Sarasota.

Ray Brescia:

Because wealthy elite lawyers went to upstate New York to escape the heat and to bathe in the springs. I don’t think they would go to Sarasota in August. So no disrespect to Sarasota, but so the ABA was literally founded by lawyers who summered in Saratoga Springs, New York, and who could go there, wealthy lawyers who could summer in Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, right. So the ABA was founded by the group of elite lawyers in 1878, and then about 20 years later, they started talking about adopting a formal code of ethics. Now, a lot has been written about the code, the first canon of legal ethics that was adopted, the canons that were adopted in the early 20th century. And there were certainly provisions of those early cannons that were designed to make it harder for non-elite lawyers to find clients because it made it very difficult to advertise that you could not pay a finder’s fee if you would, to what they refer to as a touter or a runner, someone who, and this was quite literally directed at immigrant communities who might have somebody in their community like an immigrant fixer who had access to a lawyer if they knew somebody was injured on the job or was injured in a trolley accident or a carriage ran them down, they would connect someone to a lawyer because the lawyers weren’t so populous in those communities themselves.

So the canons limit advertising because elite lawyers didn’t have to advertise, they limit the paying of a finder’s fee because elite lawyers didn’t have to pay finder’s fees. So there was a limitation put on contingency fees, not as aggressive as some members of the profession wanted. So a contingency fee where a client doesn’t pay a lawyer unless they win their case, which we see is fairly common today in personal injury actions and discrimination cases. The elites of theBar tried some of them, some corners of those elites tried to ban contingency fees even though the Alabama BARS code of ethics, which was very much a model for the ABA, a few states had these codes of ethics, and Alabama was one of the most prominent ones. The Alabama code didn’t prohibit contingency fees, didn’t even prohibit advertising yet that source code, the elites disregarded because they wanted to do that.

So I go into that history on those first cannons, but then, and others have done a lot of that research and I borrow from some of that work. I certainly go into the debates within the ABA itself, the transcripts of the debates and the correspondence around them. But where I go, which few scholars have looked at in depth, the more is in the debates within the ABA about law school accreditations. And that’s where you see some of the most explicit language about keeping immigrants out of the profession, about making it more difficult to join the profession, including having educational requirements to get into law school, having requirements that law schools have large faculties and law libraries, and that education is at least two years long. And those devices, if you would, or those tactics were all designed to make it harder to become a lawyer.

The ABA literally looked at what the American medical Association had done in reviewing its own accreditation of medical schools and licensure processes. And the A MA had reduced the number of graduates from medical schools by 50% by making it harder to get in, by making it more expensive to go to law school and making it difficult to be in law school, excuse me, in medical schools. And the ABA said, we want to do the same thing. We want to make it harder to get into law school. We want to make it harder to stay in law school and we want to make it more expensive to be a lawyer. And that had the intended effect of making it harder to operate law schools over the course. I think from 1930 to 1945, I think 70 law schools closed, and 69 of them were those that they could not meet the ABA standards for accreditation.

So the ABA working in tandem with law schools to make ABA accreditation, a requirement of entry to theBar graduating from an ABA accredited law school became a requirement for sitting for a bar exam. Or in some states like Wisconsin, which still has the diploma privilege, you have to be an ABA law school in Wisconsin to become a member of theBar. So the ABA working with the more established law schools made it more difficult to become a lawyer, and 70 years later, it is still difficult to become a lawyer. Now I think it should be difficult to become a lawyer because of the position of trust that lawyers are thrust into, but I think we are making it way too difficult now. And we also have other strategies for addressing the justice gap, which I go into in the book. But I’ll stop there and see if you wanted to follow up on anything I said or get into the access to justice.

Lee Rawles:

Absolutely. I do want to get into access to justice. It is interesting to read the historical documents when you see the ABA in the year 2024 is really trying to encourage diversity, equity and inclusion pipelines, et cetera. But some of the forces that were unleashed, like the decisions that ended up making it so prohibitively financially taxing to go to law school, has trapped many law grads into financial precarity or prevented people from becoming attorneys in the first place. So a lot of the, I guess I was about to say unintended consequences, but it sounds like many of these were very intended consequences that we’re seeing play out today. When you looked at the issue, you saw what was done at the turn of the last century, and you look at what we have today, which is an interesting mix of there being too few lawyers to meet the needs of the public, but also not enough well-paying jobs to support the lawyers we currently have or enough funding going towards making sure lawyers can make a decent living and pay off their student loans. What are some of the answers you come up with? How do we get ourselves out of this conundrum?

Ray Brescia:

Well, I think that it’s sort of an all of the above type strategy in terms of making legal problems easier to solve, trying to prevent legal problems from happening in the first place, trying to get information to consumers about their rights in an accessible way. Often using technology. It is creating a system, not unlike to go back to the medical system. Our hospital system and medical care system is we have doctors and we have registered nurses and we have nurse practitioners. I think that some states have experimented in certain contexts with having individuals who are not fully licensed attorneys. They’ve gotten a certification that enables them to handle, let’s say a landlord tenant matter or a immigration matter currently, you can be certified to handle immigration matters if you’re a Paralegal with the right training. And there are great programs that train people that do not cost as much as a legal education.

There isn’t the opportunity cost of being off being out of the economy in effect for three years. So there’s obviously law school is expensive, but you also generally, it’s very hard for law students to work for pay while they are in law school because law school is very taxing and very burdensome as it should be, right? Training is important. So it’s not just that you have to pay to go to law school, but you also generally have a hard time earning anything close to what you would earn if you were working in a full-time job. So there are programs, and I think there should be more of them that enable individuals who want to serve their community, who wants to have some legal training to handle very specific matters. We should have programs like that. We should have more programs like that. We also should enable those individuals to accumulate credit while they are earning the certification to do that work.

They should be able to apply that to a law degree even if it takes a number of years. The ABA, I’ve not checked, I think very recently the ABA might have scaled back its requirement that you have to finish your education in seven years. I think that’s been changed in the last couple of days, so I need to double check that. But one of the recommendations in my book is that we should remove that restriction. But for a lot of these programs, if you get a master’s of law or if you get a certification, you’re not allowed to apply those credits towards obtaining a law degree in the end. And I think that we should allow people to accumulate credit towards a law degree and maybe even get credit for some of their work if they are an advocate, let’s say an advocate in landlord tenant matters, maybe they can get some credit towards a law degree if they work on for a number of years. We used to have the first 150 years of the American legal profession. There was mostly lawyers became lawyers because they were apprentices first.

Lee Rawles:

Yes, someone who gets name checked a couple of times in the book and certainly is name checked all the time by American lawyers, is Abraham Lincoln and the legal profession reveres Abraham Lincoln in many instances and also would if he showed up at a courthouse today, say you are not in any way qualified. What are you doing here? I think it is interesting to see how far we can get from the mythmaking of the early American attorney and still revere that now that the system is completely different and it may be worth revisiting some of those things about reading law.

Ray Brescia:

Yeah. And with Abraham Lincoln, he apprenticed and he served as local Counsel to elite lawyers involved in railroad cases, involved in patent cases. And they would in literally his own future, cabinet secretary was one of those lawyers who took one look at Lincoln, walked into the corset and said, who is that ape? This country bumpkin lawyer? Well, that country bumpkin lawyer, he’s going to be your boss in 15 years. And Alexander Hamilton, I talk about the story of Alexander Hamilton. Alexander Hamilton didn’t even apprentice. He was applying to be a member of theBar of New York State. He was studying for a rudimentary examination that they had in New York where a judge would just ask you a few questions. And he applied for a waiver of the apprentice requirement and the New York State legislature and the courts had allowed waivers for individuals who had served in the continental army in the revolutionary Army.

And he said he applied. He said, yeah, I worked for that guy Washington, maybe you heard about him. And he was granted the waiver. So Hamilton, one of the nation’s great legal minds, never even served as an apprentice because they gave him credit for his military service, which for the most part was being Washington’s aid to camp. So we’ve had moments in our history when we didn’t have extensive law school requirements and bar examination requirements. And we recognize that work in a law office is great training. And I think it is, and it’s may sound funny for someone who teaches at a law school to say that maybe we don’t need everyone to get a formal legal education. I do think that anyone who is going to be a lawyer with the responsibility, the full responsibility of being a lawyer needs adequate training. But I also don’t think everyone who helps somebody with a legal problem needs to have full legal training if you’re focused on a narrow area of law, particularly where there aren’t a lot of lawyers who represent indigent clients. So again, landlord tenant cases, immigration cases, consumer debt cases, we can address the justice gap in those areas without plugging every case with a lawyer. I just don’t think that that’s necessary, nor is it economically feasible.

Lee Rawles:

We’re going to take another quick break to hear from our advertisers when we return. I’ll still be speaking with Ray Brescia, author of Lawyer Nation, the past, present, and Future of the American Legal Profession. Welcome back to the Modern Law Library. Ray. One of the things I was really happy to see you address in the book because it touches both on the present and the future of the legal profession is you and I have both seen the way lawyers struggle with wellbeing. And I do believe that it’s a real crisis within the profession. And I think that it’s a lot is asked of attorneys, there is a lot of trauma that you witness and take part in, in many cases, not just criminal but also civil. It’s very difficult to deal with client’s problems and your own. I just really appreciated that you went in to detail about this crisis and would love to hear more from you about what you think the profession needs to be doing to care for its own and to make sure that we’re safeguarding it for this next generation and make it better for them.

Ray Brescia:

Thank you. That’s such an important question. And I do identify as one of the six crises that the profession faces is what I call the crisis of disaffection. That many lawyers, too many lawyers don’t find fulfillment in their work are under great stress. There’s a high rate of substance abuse, there’s a high rate of suicidal ideation within the members of the legal profession. It’s really scary if you look at some of the numbers with respect to these issues. And I do think that we have to be mindful of the stress many lawyers are under by taking on a lot of work, not just the nature of the work. Not everyone does death penalty work, but still there’s a lot of work and the pressure is significant given what’s at stake. Maybe it’s your client’s liberty, maybe it’s your client’s company, maybe it’s someone who’s been discriminated against or harassed in the workplace and they’ve experienced trauma.

You experienced that trauma vicariously and the pursuit of the billable hour in private firms, the strain of heavy caseloads in nonprofit offices. It is a tough job. And I think some of wherever you are in the profession, and I think some of the processes and the innovations if you would, that the profession instituted in the face of the pandemic made some of that a little more manageable, that people didn’t have the same commutes. People weren’t always pulled in multiple directions because of family obligations. Now, some certainly were stuck at home with toddlers and trying to manage zoom school with elementary school kids. I totally get that.

Lee Rawles:

Or the poor attorney who had that zoom where he appeared as a kitten.

Ray Brescia:

Yes, he was not a cat. Yes. And so I think that there’s some indication that at some of the largest firms, the requirements that billable hour requirements are going down slightly. There is greater flexibility is being allowed, which I think is good. I think there’s more sensitivity to people saying an acknowledgement that a lawyer might say, okay, I’m going to be offline for the next two hours while I go for a run or go for a walk, go pick up my kids. That there’s more respect for that now. It’s easier to do if people are working remotely at least a day or two a week. I think a lot of the bigger firms are going back to more time in the office. I think there’s a value to that and we can talk a little bit about that as well. But I do think that there’s a growing sensitivity to the need.

We’re not anywhere where we need to be in terms of being sensitive to the stresses that lawyers are under. But I think there’s a growing sensitivity to being more accepting and being more supportive of self-care strategies that lawyers need as all humans need. But the lawyer job can be stressful and often is given what is often at stake or simply the amount of work that lawyers tend to have. I think we’re getting a little better, but I really think we have to address it. And we also have to make sure people are renewing their commitment to what I say in the book is necessary, professionalism, access and inclusion in the profession that we sort of recommit to professionalism and to understand that we shouldn’t do the client’s bidding no matter what, that we have an obligation to be zealous advocates, but to be advocates within the bounds of the law.

I think we need to reinvigorate our commitment to access to justice and make sure that every American who needs legal assistance can get it regardless of their ability to pay. And finally, I think we have to make sure that all our profession is an inclusive one and the prescription for the book through the book for not just the disaffection crisis, but really all of the crises that the profession faces now is that we become more professional in our actions, in our commitment to access to justice, and that we are as inclusive as possible within the profession.

Lee Rawles:

And I would love to follow down that path a little bit because you have alluded to this, but we haven’t discussed it directly, and I’m going to call it the dark side of the profession. You point out that for every case that has protected civil rights, that has guarded liberty, that has defended justice, there generally was an attorney arguing for the other side. And you call upon attorneys, as you just said, to when you look at professionalism, think about your morals as well as ethics. And you bring up, you have a chapter about a serpent in the ear of the president, and I would love to allow you some, the space to talk about lawyers behaving badly, let’s say.

Ray Brescia:

Yes, that’s the subtitle of my legal ethics class lawyers behaving badly. I think one of the crises that I identify in the book is the threat to democracy. And the events of January 6th were very much inspired and orchestrated by lawyers. And I go into some of the arguments that some of the lawyers made showing that they were utterly baseless and they knew it, and yet they pressed them anyway in order to serve their political ends. And what they believed was the interest of their client. And it’s one thing for a lawyer to fabricate a record in order to gain an advantage in personal injury action, that’s bad. And lawyers aren’t allowed to do that. But it’s quite another for lawyers to conspire, to halt the peaceful transfer of power, which is a central pillar of any democracy and our democracy. And it is what we have.

The symbol that we have communicated to the world since the founding is that principle. And we should be able to differentiate between a lawyer who engages in run of the mill frivolous conduct, which again is bad enough. It’s not good. Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Exactly. And it’s prohibited. But we also should call what the strategies were in the lead up to January 6th in the wake of the 2020 election. That was an orchestrated effort coordinated by lawyers seeking to simply overturn an election and undermined democracy and prevent the peaceful transfer of power. I don’t think the individuals who stormed the capitol on January 6th really were versed in the complexity of the Electoral Count Act, which gave the vice president the ceremonial role of certifying the election. And yet they were inspired to say things like Hang Mike Pence, because he didn’t have the courage as it was said, to do what needed to be done to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.

Completely outrageous. And we’re seeing the lawyers who did that, some of them have already pled guilty to crimes. Many of them are facing disbarment as they should. They should have to stand for their actions. They should be held to account for their actions. But I think we need, the entire profession needs to recommit to its principles, including that we are a profession that promotes the rule of law within a multiracial democracy that stands for individual liberty and civil rights. When you put all that together, lawyers had no business doing what they did to try to halt the peaceful transfer of power claims that Jeffrey Clark environmental lawyer in the Justice Department saying, oh, the acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen should send a letter to Georgia legislators saying that the Justice Department is investigating irregularities in the vote in Georgia simply wasn’t true, and he knew it, and Rosen didn’t send that letter.

We need more of that. We need more lawyers standing up to their colleagues and their clients when they try to do things like undermine the peaceful transfer of power in a democracy. So I think that the actions of the lawyers involved in that effort abhorrent to the profession. They’re a mark on the profession and maybe one of the reasons why people may lose faith, not only in the profession but in democracy itself. So I have a whole chapter on this. Go into great depth. We have email correspondence, internal memos, so it’s not just people looking from the outside in saying, oh, those actions look like they might be fishy. We actually have the communications that prove that they were, and the lawyers knew they were.

Lee Rawles:

Well in Lawyer Nation, you really are asking attorneys is or anyone within the legal profession, and honestly Americans in general, this is our legal system, this is our court system, this is our system of justice to take a look at what’s going on and what’s possible. And it’s been a couple months since the book came out. You and I are speaking February 15th, listeners, you live in the future, but we are speaking in February 15th. What has the response been? I believe you were able to have a presentation at the New York State Bar Association, and what have you been hearing from people after they read the book? What’s been the response?

Ray Brescia:

Well, as we speak today, the book has been out for all of eight days, but so far it has been well received. And I’ve spoken in a number of different formats with other podcast hosts, and I think the reception has generally been very good. I think people feel challenged, but also, and this is pointed out by a number of people who read the book, is that it is an optimistic book. And I do try believe in the profession. I mean, I’m so proud of the profession and the work of people who I have worked with over the years and the good that they have done. I’ve had adversaries who I respected, I have disagreed with them, but I respected them if they treated me with professionalism and I treated them with professionalism. I think that our profession is an important one. It is a key pillar in our democracy, and I think it needs to survive and it needs to do its job for our democracy to continue. I don’t know how far in the future your listeners may hear this, but I do believe that the profession has an important role to play in preserving our democracy. And I hope it will continue to do so and will take fewer steps like of the lawyers who helped to try to prevent a peaceful transfer of power. I do hope that we don’t see that again anytime soon or in the far future either.

Lee Rawles:

And if any listeners are readers are interested in reaching out to you directly to discuss some of the concepts in the book, where could they do that? Is there a website? Do you have an email address you’d like to share?

Ray Brescia:

They can go to my page on Albany Law School’s website and they’ll find my email there. Very easy to get in touch with me.

Lee Rawles:

Well, Ray, thank you so much for joining us to talk about Lawyer Nation, the past president and future of the American legal profession. And thank you to my listeners for joining us for this episode of the Modern Law Library. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate review and subscribe in your favorite podcast listening service. And if you have a book you’d like me to read on a future episode, you can always reach out to me at books at ABA Journal dot com.