Ought John Edwards' career as a plaintiffs' personal injury lawyer disqualify him from being elected President?

My blogospheric friend and fellow legal professional Stephen Bainbridge writes (much more concisely than I'm about to) about John Edwards' formal announcement of his candidacy for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination (links in original):

Back in 2004, I wrote that Edwards policies on corporate governance were "demonstrably wrong." I also criticized Edwards' impact on the economy as a trial lawyer. Given the deleterious effects the trial lawyer industry has had on the American economy, as ably demonstrated by the Manhattan Institute's Trial Lawyers Inc. project, I remain unconvinced that a trial lawyer ought to have much authority over the economy.

I would be loath to gainsay Professor Bainbridge on anything involving corporate governance, and this essay only addresses the remaining points in his post. And we agree, certainly, that neither of us would ever be able to support Edwards for high political office. But I get to that conclusion via a different logical path, and I respectfully disagree, albeit only in part, with that followed by Prof. B.

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I certainly agree with Prof. B that Edwards' specific career history as a lawyer is relevant to his fitness for public office. If he were shown to have been either incompetent or unethical as a lawyer, that would certainly be probative of his unfitness as a matter of personal character. But that would be true whether Edwards was a deal lawyer or a courtroom lawyer or any other kind of lawyer. (I argued in the 2004 election, for example, that John Kerry's comparatively dismal academic career and showing as a prosecutor before he turned to politics were among the many reasons to doubt his fitness for high office.)

And as always, I must voice my quibble over terminology: I believe what Prof. B objects to is not that Edwards is a lawyer who has frequently gone to trial (a category that includes, for example, prosecutors, criminal defense lawyers, personal injury defense lawyers, both sides in business litigation, and me), but rather, that Edwards is a lawyer who primarily represented plaintiffs in personal injury cases.

But that quibble aside, I also agree in general, at least on a macroscopic level and specifically at the margins, with most of Prof. B's and the Manhattan Institute's concerns about what the plaintiff's personal injury bar (many of whose members in fact do not frequently go to trial) may collectively have done, or be doing, or be likely to do, to our economy and our society. (I also think that it's dangerous and misleading to over-generalize on that topic. One of the reasons I like the writing of Walter Olson, Ted Frank, and their colleagues is that I believe they conscientiously try to avoid overgeneralizing, or at least to be very specific in their complaints — and they mostly succeed.)

I'm also at least somewhat inclined to think that because of the mode of most of our legal training, and for many of us the nature of our law practices, lawyers in general — not just plaintiffs' personal injury lawyers — may be more prone than those in other occupations to split hairs, play devil's advocate, rationalize, indulge in post hoc justifications, and fall prey to the perils of cultural relativity. All of which is to say, there are things about this profession that can often make it hard to maintain a principled, moral personal compass. Indeed, that may have proven true for some of the law school professors with whom Prof. B is familiar (although I'm confident that all of his own compasses are steadfast and true).

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So there is much upon which I think we probably agree. Where I part company with Prof. B, however, is over whether Edwards' career as a lawyer who primarily represented plaintiffs in personal injury cases is, by itself, a factor that ought to cut against his being President.

It's perfectly possible, for example, for a lawyer to be polite, honest, and ethical; literate and well-educated; a fiscal conservative; a hawk on national defense and foreign policy; a libertarian on most issues involving personal liberty; a federalist; a textualist in statutory interpretation, an originalist in constitutional interpretation, and a proponent of judicial restraint; an opponent of both racism and racial preferences; a God-fearing Christian who nevertheless believes in evolution and the death penalty, but is horribly conflicted on the subject of abortion; and a lifelong Republican — and yet to have also represented plaintiffs in personal injury cases with some regularity. I know a few of those, and although plaintiffs' personal injury work has never been the bulk of my practice, I have from time to time been among that small but still significantly significant number. (That a huge portion of Angry Left Democratic candidates' funding comes from members of the plaintiffs' personal injury bar does not mean that all plaintiffs' personal injury lawyers support those candidates, no more than all members of the mainstream media do.)

And I'm not sure it's fair to use Edwards' membership in a subgroup of lawyers who may, in the aggregate, be bad for society or the economy, as a basis to extrapolate the kinds of national or international economic decisions he'd be likely to make as President. Lawyers who work on a contingent fee basis may indeed be keenly motivated by the prospect of sharing in their clients' recovery — again, that would describe me, from time to time, and it's the entire premise of the contingent fee system. But I don't think Edwards' decision-making as President would likely be motivated by personal greed for money, whatever his motivations have been during his career as a plaintiff's personal injury lawyer.

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Instead, I think John Edwards would be likely to make presidential decisions less through principle of any sort than through constant focus-grouping and opinion polling. He would be a weather-vane President — always acting with an eye toward satisfying his Angry Left base, yet usually also trying to fool the moderates in order to thereby ensure his re-election. His greed would be not for money — he has plenty — but instead for power, and for the means for obtaining and retaining it.

I'm not sure there is a genuine center to John Edwards: I'm confident that he can certainly be a persuasive advocate, but I'm not at all sure that he's capable of being a strong-willed principal.

I believe, in other words, that if elected, Edward would likely be a lot like a former President, William Jefferson Clinton, or another Presidential wannabe, Hillary Rodham Clinton — neither of whom have ever been plaintiffs' personal injury lawyers, but both of whom are lawyers, or were until Bubba had to surrender his license. Indeed, both Clintons have been law professors. And they're both capable of debating what the meaning of "is" is, or of rationalizing methods by which small change has become a small fortune in futures trading.

Abe Lincoln was, by all accounts, a first-rate trial lawyer whose cases included representation of plaintiffs suing to recover for personal injuries, and who often worked on a contingent-fee basis. But that doesn't mean that he had much in common with John Edwards, or with Bill or Hillary Clinton, in terms of any of their fitness to be President.