On the evening of May 4, 1905, in Phillips Brooks House at Harvard, a 48-year-old Boston lawyer named Louis Brandeis stood up before the Ethical Society to talk about the ethics of his profession. He told the students that the public had stopped looking up to lawyers, and he told them why:
It is true that at the present time the lawyer does not hold as high a position with the people as he held seventy-five or indeed fifty years ago; but the reason is not lack of opportunity. It is this: Instead of holding a position of independence, between the wealthy and the people, prepared to curb the excesses of either, able lawyers have, to a large extent, allowed themselves to become adjuncts of great corporations and have neglected the obligation to use their powers for the protection of the people. We hear much of the "corporation lawyer," and far too little of the "people's lawyer." The great opportunity of the American Bar is and will be to stand again as it did in the past, ready to protect also the interests of the people.
Louis D. Brandeis, The Opportunity in the Law (1905), reprinted in Business: A Profession.
