With another Trump term in full swing and law school applications up by 20.5%, the legal profession has captured national attention. Loads of articles are being published on the future of the legal profession and its increasingly diverse applicant pool. Amidst a whirlwind of wild counterfactuals and less-than-scholarly forecasts, this author is left wondering what will remain constant amid this wave of changes. As Robert C. Gallagher once said, “Change is inevitable—except from a vending machine.” Therefore, in the spirit of avoiding the topical (and that of serving Ha’am), I’ll endeavor to explain one of the most fascinating constants in the legal world: the disproportionate Jewish presence in law offices and courtrooms.
Many theories have been advanced on this topic, but they all essentially boil down to the same thing: Judaism firmly values education and orders adherents to pursue justice. While these justifications may seem sufficient, this comment is ultimately as empty as an Escher sentence. It is true that we emphasize education in both religious and secular contexts, but this argument could be used for a hypothetical surplus of Jewish architects or zoologists. In short, a culture of education does not guarantee a surplus specifically in the field of law—which may be why the component about justice is always mentioned on the heels of educational claims.
Let’s consider this train of logic for a second: nobody makes the same argument about the relationship between the importance of pikuach nefesh and the disproportionate number of Jewish doctors. Although Judaism holds the sanctity of life in the highest regard, one would struggle to find this rationale applied to aspiring Jewish medical students. A popular explanation is that Jews are after professional respectability, but the research supports that esteem is a motivating factor for medical students across the board.
So let’s leave the conventional answer behind and investigate on our own. Do Jews really have a unique relationship to justice? Biblical injunctions to seek justice abound in all books of the New Testament, in passages like “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former.” In other words, Jesus rejects Judaism as a legalistic ethos with judgement and not justice at its core. Such a scene strikes as hard as any Old Testament excerpts about justice, which challenges the claim that ours is a tradition that uniquely emphasizes it.
Thus, we must ask ourselves a slightly different question that avoids broad applications: What element of Judaism is most like legal work? My answer is our commitment to literary criticism and comparative studies. While Catholics, for example, need only consult the Catechism or various encyclicals for answers to theological questions, Jews have lacked a central authority for thousands of years. Thus, Jews are tasked with wading through mountains of conflicting canonical texts such as the Midrash, Talmud, Gemara, Mishneh Torah, and Guide to the Perplexed just to get an idea of what the answer may be. Simply put, no other major religion that tasks its adherents with so much research and personal engagement in what essentially constitutes comparative legal work as Judaism. If we want answers, we have to go looking for them ourselves and learn how to do the same thing good lawyers do: read the law and compare different accepted authorities’ applications of it.
Thus, while the aforementioned conventional answer to Jews’ omnipresence in the legal field may be snappy, it glosses over an important detail: it’s not the education or pursuit of justice that makes us unique but the nature of the education itself. Jews are not taught to memorize catechisms and standardized answers handed down from a gilded sedia gestatoria—if we want to truly know what our God expects of us, we must investigate the matter ourselves. This, in my opinion, is the true answer to the age-old question “Why are so many of my cousins lawyers?”.
The opinions expressed in this post reflect the views of the author(s) and not UCLA or ASUCLA Communications Board.
Cover Image: Maerten de Vos, Moses Showing the Tablets of the Law to the Israelites, 1575. Photograph by Sailko, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 3.0.
