Edward White's nifty little entry in OUP's "Very Short Introduction" series is "American Legal History: A Very Short Introduction." I'm reading it because I'm toying with the idea of assigning it in a course. (These books, if you don't know them, are tiny paperback books, not much larger or thicker than a big cellphone, that introduce a reader to a subject. The topics range from "The Earth" to "Freud" to "The Blues" to "The Trojan War" to ...)
My eye just happened across the following series of sentences in a little section entitled "The legal profession in the twentieth century":
"Lawyers arranged the mergers between industrial competitors that created the giant holding companies of the late ninetheenth and early twentieth centuries. Lawyers helped their clients secure patents, copyright inventions, and establish protection for their innovations in intellectual property. Lawyers advised movie studios, actors, and participants in the record industry. Lawyers were deeply involved in the movements for greater racial and gender equality and in the protection of the civil rights and civil liberties of minorities."
All true, but that last sentence is importantly incomplete, isn't it? In a way that we like it to be?
Do you see what's missing? (Or at least what I see as missing?) Answer below.
Lawyers were also deeply involved in opposing movements for greater racial and gender equality and in opposing the protection of the civil rights and civil liberties of minorities.
We do love our heroic narrative, don't we?
I guess it should say "On average, lawyers were not involved in the movement for racial and gender equality."
Posted by: Jack | December 02, 2015 at 06:42 PM
Jobs.
Posted by: Sy Ablelman | December 03, 2015 at 11:53 AM