American hostility to lawyers has persisted unchanged for three centuries

Evidence

Lawyers in America have never been well liked. One of the first lawyers to arrive in the New World was an Englishman named Thomas Morton, who landed at Plymouth Colony in 1625, four years after the Pilgrims. Two years later he was jailed for trading firearms to the Indians and then expelled from the colony. In Massachusetts, fifteen lawyers practiced the profession in 1740, collecting debts and litigating disputes among merchants. By the time of the Revolution, that number had grown to seventy. For some citizens, lawyers had become “cursed hungry Caterpillars” whose fees “eat out the very Bowels of our Commonwealth.” Two hundred years later the basic complaint remains the same. “We may well be on our way to a society overrun by hordes of lawyers, hungry as locusts,” said Chief Justice Warren Burger in 1977. — , Harr Jonathan - A Civil Action, 220

Categorization

• CANDY: Lawyers as ‘cursed hungry Caterpillars’ whose fees ‘eat out the very Bowels of our Commonwealth’ is a quotable 18th-century insult, and Burger’s 1977 locust line shows the same gripe verbatim.
• XREF: Connects to the sociology-of-professions and anticolonial-satire material on how a trade’s reputation is manufactured. — connects to: Commercial complexity made lawyers indispensable despite colonial hostility — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 519; Public confidence in American courts and lawyers is strikingly low — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 98

Broader Connections

• Public confidence in American courts and lawyers is strikingly low #corroborates (0.90) — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 98
• Commercial complexity made lawyers indispensable despite colonial hostility #qualifies (0.85) — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 519