LAWYER, in a broad sense one whose principal occupation is related to the making or administration of the law, and who has received an education sufficiently wide in its scope to dis tinguish him from minor administrative officials; more specif ically one upon whom the State has conferred important special privileges in connection with the administration of justice, to the exclusion, however, of administrative officials, judges, legal scholars or law teachers, as such. Lawyers duly admitted to prac tice are "officers of the court." The essential distinction between these and "public officers," in a technical sense, is that lawyers are not restricted in number. Instead of being appointed to fill specific official vacancies, they constitute an indeterminate official class or order; they differ also from most public officers in that their official relationship continues during good behaviour, instead of for a specified term, and in that their compensation comes from their clients instead of from the State. These incidental charac teristics help to obscure, but do not essentially affect, the pecul iarly "public" nature of the legal profession.
A variety of influences—all grounded in this intimate connec tion between law and politics or government—have caused the lawyers of different countries to differ widely from one another. The Continent bases its jurisprudence upon the university-made civil law, in place of the judge-made common law of England and America. The practice, in a broad sense, of this civil law consists of several co-ordinate professions, each of which constitutes a career in itself. Such are, for instance, the profession of judge, of diplomat, of higher civil servant, of law teacher and scholar. The United States stands at the opposite extreme ; the student, of ter his formal education is completed, is admitted by the State to the privilege of engaging in general practice of the law. There is little or no connection between his course of preparation— which may or may not be in a university—and the particular line of highly specialized legal activity in which he will find himself at first, and from which he will not infrequently pass in time to the bench, into politics or even business. In England the lawyer occupies a position somewhat resembling that of his colleague in the United States, but not to the extreme exemplified there. The principal difference is that English barristers, from whom alone the bench of judges is recruited, are sharply distinguished from the more numerous body of solicitors. Finally, England's self-govern ing dominions are in a sense intermediate between the mother country and the United States. The profession is usually techni
cally divided at the outset, but outside of Quebec and South Africa, where the civil law prevails, there is no rule against a sin gle individual's practising both as barrister and as solicitor.
Because of these differences in the meaning of the term, corn-. parative figures as to the number of lawyers in different coun tries are likely to be somewhat misleading. Census figures are used, both because none other are available for the United States, and because in England and Canada the number carried on the lawyers' own official rolls is not always identical with that of active practitioners.
In the United States the number of lawyers to each million inhabitants ranged, in 1920, from approximately 600 in Alabama, Mississippi and the two Carolinas to 1,800-2,0oo in Oregon and California; nearly 3,00o in Nevada and over 5,500 in the Federal capital, Washington, D.C. In Canada the range was from 500 or 600 in the Maritime Provinces to approximately 'J o° in Mani toba, 1,300 in British Columbia, and nearly 4,100 per million in Regina, the provincial capital of Saskatchewan.
The proportion of women to men lawyers is everywhere small. The following table shows that this source of variation counts for very little in explaining why the United States and Canada have so many more lawyers in proportion to their population than has England.
The relation between the number of lawyers in different com munities and such factors as density of population, wealth and industrial and political conditions, has still to be worked out on a scientific basis. One important explanation, however, of the wide differences that are revealed by these figures is to be found in the dominant political philosophies that underlie existing require ments for admission to legal practice. In older jurisdictions the tendency is to emphasize, to the exclusion of all other considera tions, the need of a rigorous course of preparation, designed to promote competency and character among lawyers. Younger juris dictions are more alive to the evils that would flow from making access to a lawyer's special privileges unduly difficult for students of modest means. How these two principles—that of efficiency and that of democratic idealism—may be suitably combined, is a matter of current controversy.
See also ATTORNEY ; BAR; BAR ASSOCIATION; BARRISTER; COUN SEL AND COUNSELLOR; INNS OF COURT; LEGAL EDUCATION; SOLICITOR.