Lawyers in America are reviled by the population-at-large. Hatred of lawyers has gradually moved further and further down the collective American brain stem and is now lodged deep in the medulla, hard wired in with breathing and other vital functions. To express this contempt, the "lawyer joke" has become the medium of choice. In an era when the yoke of PC censorship has claimed the Polish joke and the Blonde joke, lawyer jokes have multiplied to make up the difference. Worse still, the character of the jokes has changed. Every year their fictitious lawyer victims are debased with more savage and dehumanizing indignities. Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan and a lawyer are in a lifeboat with no food, etc.

This past summer, I cast my lot with the vilified. I was a "summer associate" at a large New York law firm, testing the waters in between my second and third years of law school. Looking forward to a summer to be spent cheek by jowl amidst members of America’s most reviled profession, I was prepared to see a poisonous stereotype assume flesh-and-Armani form. But my search for monsters was fruitless. The people I met were no less human than any randomly selected pool of white-collar American workers.

After a summer of work and observation, I concluded that lawyer jokes don’t proliferate in America because American attorneys are inherently nasty people. Rather, such jokes proliferate because the structure of the American legal system consistently encourages lawyers to perform work that is profoundly anti-humanist.

Let me provide a concrete example from my summer work - the very first assignment I received as a matter of fact. The case involved a client of the firm who had been cited by a federal inspector for skimping on worker safety. For the client, the citation was a headache. New equipment would have to be purchased. The production routine would become more complicated. Workers would have to be retrained. The cheaper alternative was to fight the citation. When the work order trickled down through the firm’s hierarchy, I was assigned the task of writing the regulatory appeal - a document explaining to the powers that be why our client should be exempt from the bothersome regulation.

I brought a novice’s eagerness to the task. When it was done, I beamed with unadulterated satisfaction. My prose was elegant, humble, concise. "Now this," I thought, "this is advocacy!" It was only months later that I began to put my efforts into perspective and question why the document was written in the first place.

As a matter of economic survival, most law firms cannot afford to turn down new client projects. If a law firm rejects new business on "moral grounds," they will quickly find that their clients will take all their business to firms with fewer scruples. For my firm, refusing the client was not an option. Moreover, once the appeal had to be written, it had to be written well - for the sake both of the client’s expectations and our firm’s reputation. Anything less than zealous advocacy would have been unthinkable.

Assuming the appeal I wrote is eventually successful, the result will be that by dint of my efforts, a certain set of American workers will go about their day-to-day work with increased exposure to injury. What if, as a result, one of the workers dies? This is a real statistical possibility. Am I responsible? Is the client? The legislators who conceived and drafted the appeal mechanism?

In the first year of law school, I was told that the structure of the American legal system requires zealous advocacy. The needs of the litigant trump the moral convictions of the litigant’s lawyer. I remember thinking that there was something sexy and exciting about this: The vindication of individual rights over the dictates of partisan emotionalism. But once it was time to apply the doctrine, it seemed hollow.

The adversarial legal structure is widely defended. Supporters of the status quo contend that every party in a legal dispute should have the right to zealous advocacy because effective truth finding and policy making come from the interplay of competing zealots. Truth is eked out, the theory goes, through the agonistic dilations of self-interested fanatics.

But in this case, the workers were not represented directly in the appeal process. I doubt whether the workers concerned were even aware that this issue was being fought over. In formal terms, it is a battle between the client and the federal government. In real terms, the battle is between the client’s phalanx of high-paid lawyers and a corps of relatively disinterested government bureaucrats. Zealot-for-hire vs. faux-zealot.

The disturbing thing about my own work habits was the extent to which I was willing to temporarily bury my high-flown humanistic musings while I busied myself with the task at hand. By some flight of cognitive dissonance, I managed to squeeze out a flourish of pride when I completed writing the appeal documentation. A dash of professional anxiety was enough to strip me of all moral perspective.

Maybe this insight helps answer the question of why American lawyers work so hard. It seems that the demanding schedule of an American lawyer is a necessary part of the job not simply in so far as it amplifies the quantity of work produced by an attorney - but in so far as it also affects work quality. A relaxed lawyer will have time for reflection. Her humanism will undermine her work product. A harried lawyer, on the other hand, will be a lawyer who does not have the luxury of contemplation. Her mind is enshrouded in a cloud of professional anxiety. Work is a blur - and the only meaningful goal is to dispose of it competently and thoroughly - workers of the world be damned.