REVIEWS OF STEWARDS OF DEMOCRACY

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Book Description
Argues that judges, lawyers, and law schools should emphasize experience and character over reason or arcane learning, to create a more democratic legal profession in tune with the public interest.

Stewards of Democracy beckons judges and lawyers to a professional tradition supportive of the institutions of self-government. It challenges the beliefs of many American judges, legal scholars, and law teachers that political decisions can often best be made by high courts who are independent of the citizens they purport to govern. Among those challenged to reconsider their roles are the Supreme Court of the United States, eminent legal scholars, and distinguished law schools, which reinforce one another in the belief that they know best how Americans should live. The careers of Thomas Cooley, Louis Brandeis, Ernst Freund, Learned Hand, and Byron White are considered as examples of the contrary tradition respectful of democracy as the source of the political, economic, and social stability required to sustain other valued rights.

Carrington, who teaches at Duke University Law School and has served as a legal advisor to the federal government, is attuned to the continuity between education, philosophy, and the legal profession. He's also attuned to the impact of that continuity on the larger social and political order and focuses his book on the role of lawyers in U.S. political history. Despite popular dislike of lawyers, Carrington's own faith in the profession is "redeemed when lawyers and judges subordinate their own political preferences to those expressed by the institutions of representative self-government." In this regard, he focuses on some of the giants of the profession: Thomas M. Cooley, Louis D. Brandeis, Ernst Freund, Learned Hand, and Byron White. These were men who were aware of their public responsibilities and could mediate the interests of the democratic majority and the monied class, and/or other minorities, with a non-self-interested bias toward the public good. This book is a worthy read for those interested in the intersection of legal personalities and U.S. history. Vernon Ford


 

This is a wonderful book by a former law professor of mine. Taking up some "exemplars" from the early days of the law profession in the United States, Professor Carrington takes a thorough and unsentimental look at the development of legal education, the legal profession and the law itself in America. This leads into the second half of the book which deals quite harshly with the advent of autocratic "judicial heroism" which has increasingly supplanted the democratic process in many areas of American life. Do you remember getting to vote on abortion? Whether corporations have the right to freedom of speech? About many other issues? How you would have voted (either directly or through your representative) is arguably secondary to the fact that you had no part in making decisions about fundamental societal issues that affect you directly. --Anonymous

Professor Carrington's book is a wake-up call to lawyers, legal educators, judges and legislators alike. -- Anonymous