Professionals educated in graduate programs and licensed by state bar associations to prepare and plead cases in lower courts and appeals courts, as well as to provide legal counsel to clients. The adversarial nature of the American common-law system provides lawyers a broad and flexible role. This includes investigating facts, gathering evidence, trying cases, negotiating settlements, formulating business transactions, drafting legislation and urging courts to create new legal precedents. Competition, globalization and the impossibility of thoroughly mastering multiple areas of the law have lead to speeialization, and have rewarded the combining of legal specialists into ever-larger law firms. Despite being authorized to perform a broader range of functions than colleagues in most European systems, lawyers are professionally constrained by only a loose construct of ethical standards, enforced by a largely self-regulating system administered by state bar associations and judicial tribunals.

Lawyers saturate US society The California State Bar alone has close to 170,000 members. Although declining, the number of annual applications to law schools is 70,000. Roughly 40,000 enroll each year as first-year students at American Bar Association approved law schools. Many of these view a legal education as a tool, a method of critical thinking and problem-solving, and never practice law after becoming licensed attorneys.

Lawyers are despised, scorned and vilified for their adversarial role and simultaneously respected for their wealth, skill and power. More than 60 percent of the delegates at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 which drafted the United States Constitution were lawyers. At the beginning of the twenty-first century lawyers account for 43 percent of the members of Congress and 16 percent of state legislators. Lawyers, such as Thurgood Marshall, were responsible for every watershed legal ruling of the Civil Rights movement. The legal profession’s best face is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union’s protection of civil liberties and the thousands of hours of pro bono service lawyers provide the poor.

Lawyer television shows and films maintain enduring popularity despite having moved in the past twenty years from largely favorable portrayals to current characterizations, especially in films, of lawyers as cut-throat, often incompetent, predators. These same television shows and films also fail to reflect the reality of the profession’s lack of racial and ethnic diversity. While the number of women attorneys at large firms has increased to 30 percent, only 7 percent of lawyers in the United States are from minority groups. Three percent are African Amer-icans, 2 percent are Latinos and less than 1 per-cent are Asian Americans or Native Americans, a problem that the decline in public affirmative-action admission programs will exacerbate.

The litigious nature of American society and the necessity of legal assistance in making many crucial life decisions assure the continued number and power of lawyers, despite the persistent public lack of confidence in the profession.