WOE UNTO YOU, LAWYERS!

with, that The Law is regularly bought and, therefore, regularly tends to favor those
with money enough to buy it.
That is why the center of the nation’s law business is in New York City and
why the bulk of the nation’s influential and profitable law practice is carried on in
the Wall Street law factories. People and companies in other parts of the country
have their legal grievances and disputes and their court squabbles, and they have
them in much greater proportion than the proportion of the nation’s law business that
is carried on outside New York. But the richest people and the biggest companies
make almost all their financial arrangement and their important business deals in
New York. And financial arrangements and important business deals, even more
than actual legal disputes, are what the lawyers thrive on.
Most New York lawyers spend most of their time working out legal advice for
the business titans that make their financial headquarters in the city. It may be
advice about how to word a series of mortgages or conditional-sale contracts or
leases or stock certificates, so that the little fellows on the other side of the deals will
have little or no chance for legal redress if they should later feel themselves cheated.
It may be advice about an intercorporate transaction, where the sole real usefulness
of the advice will be to counter any tricks of legal language that the other side, also
advised by high-paid lawyers, might try to pull. It may be advice about how to get
around a bothersome government regulation and still keep on good terms with The
Law, which of course is more almighty than any government regulation – advice that
thousands of smaller companies or less wealthy people would love to have too, if
only they could afford it. It may be advice about how to make use of legal language
so as to get out of paying taxes – as when J.P. Morgan, for all his yacht and his
grouse-shooting, perfectly Legally avoided the federal income tax for a couple of
years while hundreds of thousands of $1500-a-year men had to chip in to the U.S.
Treasury.
In any case, it will be advice which has a dollars-and-cents value, to the
person or the company that buys it, somewhat greater than the stiff price the lawyers
charge for it. And the direct or indirect losers in the whole affair will be the
companies and people by the millions who cannot afford thus to buy The Law.
There is no more striking parody of The Law’s boast that it represents “equal justice
for all” than in the work of those top men of the legal trade who cluster and prosper
in New York City.
Moreover, most good lawyers go to New York before they die. They go to
New York because that is where they can make the most money out of their knack of
tossing around legal principles and legal language. As a matter of fact, herds of
them are coaxed straight to New York from the law schools every year. And thus,
incidentally, the profession gets in another telling blow for the perpetuation of the
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