Noun

Singular lawyer

Plural lawyers

lawyer (plural lawyers)

1. A professional person qualified (as by a law degree and/or bar exam) and authorized to practice law, i.e. conduct lawsuits and/or give legal advice.
2. By extension, a legal layman who argues points of law.

Synonyms

• advocate
• attorney
• counselor

Derived terms

• lawyerly
• (by law specialism) corporate lawyer

A lawyer, according to Black's Law Dictionary, is "a person learned in the law; as an attorney, counsel or solicitor; a person licensed to practice law." Law is the system of rules of conduct established by the sovereign government of a society to correct wrongs, maintain stability, and deliver justice. Working as a lawyer involves the practical application of abstract legal theories and knowledge to solve specific individualized problems, or to advance the interests of those who retain (i.e., hire) lawyers to perform legal services.

The role of the lawyer varies significantly across legal jurisdictions, and so it can be treated here in only the most general terms. More information is available in country-specific articles (see below).

Lawyers are people who practice law. In most countries, lawyers enter their profession through a period of specialized study. Lawyers are a frequent target of criticism, in part because they are often the public face of unscrupulous parties such as persons being tried for crimes, because they employ a specialized jargon which makes it difficult for persons without a legal education to receive the benefits of the legal system without hiring a lawyer, and because they make up a disproportionate percentage of politicians.

• Dick: The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. Cade: Nay, that I mean to do.
  • William Shakespeare, Henry the Sixth, Part II, IV, ii (1623)

• Is it not remarkable that the common repute which we all give to attorneys in the general is exactly opposite to that which every man gives to his own attorney in particular? Whom does anybody trust so implicitly as he trusts his own attorney? And yet is it not the case that the body of attorneys is supposed to be the most roguish body in existence?
  • Anthony Trollope, Miss Mackenzie (1865), ch. 17 (Project Gutenburg e-text)

• [Lawyers] can make the worse appear the better cause, as though they were fresh from Leontine schools, and have been known to wrest from reluctant juries triumphant verdicts of acquittal for their clients, even when those clients, as often happens, were clearly and unmistakably innocent.
  • Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying", Intentions (New York: Brentano's, 1905)

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Tue Jun 16 20:08:58 2009