The Renaissance Lawyer¹

Alberti Disparages the Life of a Lawyer

(from Leon Battista Alberti’s De Commodis literarum atque incommodis)

What can I say of our lawyers that is truly good? What can I say in praise of canon law and civil law? For it is commonly said that these disciplines bring grain, while the other arts all gather only straw. Good gods! Big piles of documents, fat manuscripts, heavy portfolios (and how heavy, for God’s sake!) become a complex apparatus that would bring anyone who took it to the tavern near the civic buildings a lot more money, if he charged the customers admission, than lawyers receive form their clients, for all their formal and organized pomp and for all the books and libraries of books on shelves in their houses. Just think: do you suppose anyone has the financial resources to purchase all those books without using up his whole fortune and more, and wouldn’t it be the greatest folly to pursue wealth by spending so much? Aren’t people who want to gain wealth by buying so many books with such an expenditure of many very much like the men Caesar described as fishing with hooks of gold? It is folly not only to want to pursue wealth by spending so much money but also to expend for that purpose such efforts and such enormous amounts of time.

“Tomorrow,” says the client, “you must plead my case,” and he give you a modest sum, the rest being promised for later. Whatever is offered, you accept it and spend the whole night looking into books by the light of a lantern, with freezing feet and hands, looking for fantasms, thinking over stratagems and all that is in the books, bringing anxiety, weariness, hunger, and cold on yourself. The next day, you bring to the case a hoarse voice, a twisted neck, red and water eyes, and a spirit not less thirsty and anxious for money than eager and willing to inflict harm. And you recite at the top of your lungs paragraphs and terms from the law woven into endless highly detailed arguments. You burst all the seams of your miserable heart; you are not afraid, for the sake of payment, to fight and quibble with the most powerful and eminent citizens. They threaten you, revile you, swear at you, cast blame on you. Unhappy man, you expose your reputation and your back to all of this for the sake of money.

That’s how it goes, doesn’t it, when they labor for the money they want, when they proclaim and exclaim, when they suffer malice for a price, plead the cause of others, enter threateningly into their quarrels, and do all the things that this order of the educated known as lawyers consider appropriate, anything in fact that may bring monetary gain. Don’t they even see how they are placed in public an horrible slavery? What a way to make money! These things not only fail to make them rich but actually ruin their families, even if their fathers were rich, make enemies, and, with the greatest expenditure of labor, involve them in servile bargains.

Endnotes

¹ Leon Battista Alberti, The Use and Abuse of Books (De Commodis literarum atque incommodis) (Renée Neu Watkins, trans.) (Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc., 1999) ⇑