Subject: Disquisition on Lawyers and Language Arts

Dear Editor:

"Reading maketh a full man; conference maketh a ready man; and writing maketh an exact man."-Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

The readers of the Journal of the Missouri Bar are likely to accept the wisdom of the foregoing maxim.This is so because attorneys understand the importance of reading, consultation, and of writing in their professional lives.

Consider, then, the interrelationship of lawyers and literature. The readers of the Journal of the Missouri Bar and Sir Francis Bacon have something very important in common: you are fellow members of the learned profession of Law!

Although better known as a writer and philosopher, Sir Francis Bacon was admitted to the Bar in 1582, rose to the position of Attorney General in 1613 and became Lord Chancellor in 1618.

While the wisdom of his above-quoted maxim has application to the generality of humankind, it has special significance for fellow members of the Bar. You understand that reading improves your mastery of the facts and of the law of the case at hand. You benefit from collegial consultation by way of advice and/or validation. Third, your briefs to the Court advocate your client's position zealously with clarity, conciseness and precision.

Consider, further, the connection of language arts and lawyering: how oaths are made up of words as are statutes and contracts and, further, how lawyers use felicity of diction and vigor of language to achieve their goals.

Attorney-authors are well represented in the Great Books of the Western World.

The historian, for example, who gave us The History of England is Thomas Babington Macauley (1800-1859), who was admitted to the Bar in 1826 and elected to Parliament in 1830.

And although better known as a philosopher of Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) read law as part of his formal education.

Similarly, the tough-minded materialist philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) also had read law as part of his formal education.

That spellbinding author of Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), studied law. It is Stevenson who painted a flattering word picture of "Mr. Utterson," a practicing attorney who is the friend and dinner guest of Dr. Jekyll in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

In the category of those educated for the Law who turned to the language arts are Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), Edmund Burke (1729-1797) and the ebullient W.S. Gilbert (1836-1919) of Gilbert & Sullivan operetta fame.

A "sleeper" in the august company of lawyer-literati is Henry Fielding (1707-1754). Better known to Americans as the author of Tom Jones, Fielding enrolled as a law student in Middle Temple in 1737, was called to the Bar and became the Justice of the Peace in Middlesex and Westminster.

The late John Shepherd of the Saint Louis Bar used to commend litigators to John Galsworthy's How to Write a Play for pointers on how to conduct a jury trial. Galsworthy (1867-1933) was a barrister.

Even though not in our Anglo-American tradition, the following lawyer-luminaries from the Continent deserve honorable mention: Moliere (1645-1696), Voltaire (1694-1778), Goethe (1749-1832), Balzac (1799-1850) and Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859). But I digress!

Our American colonial period graced us with splendid attorney-authors, such as Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804), James Madison (1751-1836) and John Jay (1745-1829). This phenomenon continued into the following century with John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) and Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) and into contemporary times as well.

Judge Learned Hand made his contribution on this subject in decorous prose: "I venture to believe that it is as important to a judge called upon to pass on a question of constitutional law, to have at least a bowing acquaintance with Acton and Maitland, with Thucydides, Gibbon and Carlyle, with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Milton, with Machiavelli, Montaigne and Rabelais, with Plato, Bacon, Hume and Kant, as with the books which have been specifically written on the subject. For in such matters everything turns upon the spirit in which he approaches the questions before him..Men do not gather figs of thistles, nor supply institutions from judges whose outlook is limited by parish or class."

For a brilliant piece of legal writing, read the Petition for Rehearing in Reid v. Covert, a 1955 case before the Supreme Court of the United States. If Petitioner's filing were to be anything more than an exercise in articulated frustration, Frederick Bernays Weiner, Esquire knew that he must concentrate on what the Court's opinion had overlooked. He wrote: "The concept of presenting Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark doubtless has fascination. But just as the Melancholy Dane cannot, despite heroic efforts, be completely exorcised from the play, just as he constantly flits back and forth into the action regardless of nomenclature, so in these cases, where the results were reached after ostensible rejection of whatever powers the Constitution has conferred upon Congress to govern the armed forces, a reading of the Court's opinions makes obvious that military considerations were necessarily relied upon to uphold the court-martial proceedings here under review."

Mr. Weiner had resorted to his Shakespeare.and succeeded in winning the rehearing in which he also prevailed!

In conclusion, you, the readers of the Journal of the Missouri Bar may take justifiable pride in being members of the same learned profession as Bacon, Stevenson, Scott, Fielding and the others mentioned above. Let me wear the garb but not the clothes of Percy Bysshe Shelley when I contend that you are the unacknowledged legislators of the world!

Very truly yours,

Thomas P. Knoten
St. Louis