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.

Jonathan Harr, A Civil Action, loc. 220