Law Day 2050: Post-Professionalism, Moral Leadership, and the Law-as-Business Paradigm

Inspired by Ted Schneyer’s future history of professional discipline and Bob Gordon’s description of “the hazy aspirational world” of the “Law Day Sermon,” I offer a vision of the legal profession’s next fifty years in the form of a Law Day speech from the year 2050. Looking back on developments in the first half of the twenty-first century, this piece explores the implications of the analysis proposed in my earlier article, The Professionalism Paradigm Shift: Why Discarding Professional Ideology Will Improve the Conduct and Reputation of the Bar. The speech presents a projection of the moral leadership the bar could achieve if it were to embrace the law as a business paradigm.