So … I’m in the middle of some serious research for my next novel, forcing me to examine and re-examine Roman legal practice and the institution of slavery in the Third Century B.C. When from out of nowhere, a random thought jumps out at me: lawyers have just always been really shady folks.
Now, for those of you with recent, practical, first-hand experience, this may not seem shocking. Most of you probably even have a couple good lawyer jokes close to hand. I, on the other hand, spend most of my time with lawyers in negotiations of one type or another, where they generally try to keep me out of trouble. This has, I suppose, led to a very different opinion of lawyers than the average person carries around with them.
Yet pouring over legal proceedings from a couple millennia ago I can’t help but see what most of you see today. Many of those practitioners of law seem to have been morally questionable people indeed! And they had an outsized influence over, at times, national-level decisions. Decisions they seem to have pushed in directions most advantageous to themselves! More to the point of my research, their legal opinions decided the fates of so many luckless souls who suddenly found themselves members of Rome’s lowest social order.
Prisoners of war, victims of piracy, debtors, and just those born to the wrong parents could easily find themselves in this situation, where the only protection they could rely upon was the strict application of Roman law. But the “Twelve Tables” upon which Republican Roman law was based, were not the most precisely worded legal framework. More like the Pirate’s Code, they were guidelines, requiring lots of defining of terms and agreement on what the original intent behind those precepts had been. Enter the lawyers, whose job it was to study not only those laws but also how Roman magistrates had applied them over the years. Everyone could agree that a consistent application of laws was preferable to a haphazard approach, otherwise nobody would really know what was legal and what wasn’t. And so Roman lawyers generally worked to more clearly delineate the boundaries of what was and wasn’t acceptable to Roman society.
In my weekend reading, that appears to have led to some pretty bizarre, and sometimes perverse, treatises. One slave, apparently sold to another owner in a distant city, was kidnapped by brigands during transport and sold to a third owner. Once the whole story was unraveled, Roman lawyers argued over which owner retained possession, and which were entitled to damages. Add in the fact that the second owner had made the purchase with the intent to set the poor man free and you have a wonderfully complicated legal issue that only trained lawyers could navigate. Case after case, all dealing with the already distasteful subject of humans treated and traded like livestock or canned goods, and my head was starting to hurt.
Still, there were points of interest in the reading. Under Republican Roman law, one’s citizenship and social status seem to have derived entirely from their mother, without regard to who their father might have been. This is interesting in a famously paternalistic society. But it helps to make clear a few things; notably, how the child of a slave was legally born into slavery, even when their father was free, or even hailing from Rome’s higher echelons of society.
This was not completely new to me, as I put the concept to use in explaining Fulvius’s legal status in Q.Fulvius: Debt of Dishonor. Yet back then I’d not dug quite so far into the legal questions as I did yesterday … and was rather sickened by what I found. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, there was an entire legal framework laid out which determined the fate of any given citizen and how that person might wind up in bondage.
Thieves who couldn’t pay assessed damages were turned over to their victims as temporary slaves. Families of soldiers serving in Rome’s long wars with Carthage—all of whom were landowners by law—found they couldn’t keep their farms solvent with the men gone for years at a time and wound up being sold into slavery to pay their debts. Passengers on ships seized by pirates—a big problem at the time—found themselves sold into slavery if they couldn’t raise the ransom demanded. There were apparently A LOT of ways an early Roman might find him or herself chained, branded, and grinding someone else’s corn. And it seems there was a law—and a lawyer—for each one.
Time passes and things change, but the ability and apparent willingness of lawyers to wallow in the pits of human despair seems to remain the same. That said, objectively, one has to ask where else would they be? Laws are written not to restrain the moral but the immoral, and lawyers study and practice the law. Therefore, it sort of makes sense that wherever one finds human suffering and misery, there’s probably a lawyer lurking somewhere nearby. It is, for better or worse, the constant backdrop upon which their profession requires them to act.
So, my apologies to Ed, Dale, Nathan, and Jon, all of whom I’ve spent countless hours with preparing for and engaging in negotiations. You gentlemen have all been incredibly helpful—if at times maddening—and I might have found myself in a great deal of trouble in any of those efforts were it not for your presence, guidance, and, occasionally, guile. I appreciate the work you do every single day.
That said, my research of late has led me to believe that the negative connotations associated with your profession have a long history indeed. Well-deserved, perhaps, given the nature of what so many of your forebears have inflicted—or simply justified—for so, so many years. To shamelessly borrow and adapt from Norm at a little tavern known as Cheers, “Lawyers … can’t live with’m … pass the beer nuts!”
M. G. Haynes