History of the legal profession

In Western Europe, the legal profession went into decline during the Dark Ages, re-emerging during the 12th and 13th centuries in the form of experts on canon law.

This law was widely disregarded in practice, but was never abolished, which meant that orators could never present themselves as legal professionals or experts.

[3] They had to uphold the legal fiction that they were merely an ordinary citizen generously helping out a friend for free, and thus they could never organize into a real profession—with professional associations and titles and all the other pomp and circumstance—like their modern counterparts.

[10] Like their Greek contemporaries, early Roman advocates were trained in rhetoric, not law, and the judges before whom they argued were also not law-trained.

[11] But very early on, unlike Athens, Rome developed a class of specialists who were learned in the law, known as jurisconsults (iuris consulti).

[12] Thus, the Romans were the first to have a class of people who spent their days thinking about legal problems, and this is why their law became so "precise, detailed, and technical.

[17] By the 380s, advocates were studying law in addition to rhetoric (thus reducing the need for a separate class of jurisconsults); in 460, Emperor Leo imposed a requirement that new advocates seeking admission had to produce testimonials from their teachers; and by the sixth century, a regular course of legal study lasting about four years was required for admission.

[20] Roman notaries were not law-trained; they were often barely literate, with an unfavorable reputation for wrapping simple transactions in mountains of legal jargon, since they were paid by the line.

"[22]: 185  However, from 1150 onward, a small but increasing number of men became experts in canon law but only in furtherance of other occupational goals, such as serving the Roman Catholic Church as priests.

[27] The new trend towards professionalization culminated in a controversial proposal at the Second Council of Lyon in 1275 that all ecclesiastical courts should require an oath of admission.

By the 21st century, over one million practitioners in the United States held law degrees, and many others served the legal system as justices of the peace, paralegals, marshalls, and other aides.

Most leading lawyers came from high caste Brahman families that had long traditions of scholarship and service, and they profited from the many lawsuits over land that resulted from these legal changes.

[35] Gandhi in 1920 proposed an alternative arbitration system but very few legal professionals accepted his call to boycott the established courts.