Is the Legal Profession Too Independent?

Faced with mounting pressure to permit national law practice and increase access to legal services for those who cannot afford to pay for them and critiques about growing inequality and its failure to lead the battles for greater gender and racial justice, the legal profession’s response has been to resist reform proposals by invoking its independence. Lawyers and lawyers alone, asserts the profession, ought to determine the pace and details of nationalizing law practice, set the conditions under which nonlawyers and artificial intelligence can offer legal services, and respond to growing inequality among lawyers and concerns about the role lawyers play, and fail to play, in the quest for a more just society. Any outside interference, cautions the profession, would undermine lawyers’ independence and our commitment to the Rule of Law. Asserting the independence of the bar has proven to be an effective rhetorical ploy, successfully disarming criticisms and weakening calls for reform— because who can argue against the Rule of Law?