When did it change from a respected position to the butt of jokes?
I was watching the film crimson peak the other day, a film set in 1887. There's a scene where a character says that every man in the room earned their wealth and weren't born into nobility. Except one man, who is a lawyer.
This offhand joke got me thinking, did these jokes actually exist in 1887?
Yes, they did. There are records of anti-lawyer sentiment in cartoons and public writing as early as the eighteenth century in both the 13 colonies and Britain. In the 13 colonies, lawyers were so mistrusted and seen as greedy that some colonies forbid them from taking fees in order to try and prevent extortion of clients. In the nineteenth century United States, antilawyer sentiment continued both due to these colonial roots and due to the rise of Jacksonian democratic thought that saw lawyers as an elitist class. There’s some really great examples of these ideas discussed by Maxwell Bloomfield in his book American Lawyers in a Changing Society (1976), including examples of antebellum US children’s textbooks implying that lawyers are inherently greedy and unnecessary to a happy community. Michael Hoeflich (who is a historian of American law and lawyers) also has written a lot on antilawyer sentiment in the US, including an article on the repeated references to lawyers as inherently venal/self-interested/etc in American and British art and periodicals. Interestingly, a lot of early writing by people in the American legal profession in the nineteenth century about the profession as a whole is dedicated to trying to redeem the eyes of the profession in the public as a noble calling that upholds justice and the American constitutional foundations. This is a kind of broad overview of it but I hope it helps!
Obligatory I am still a student but I just finished doing research on genuinely this exact topic. Please feel free to correct/add anything I missed.
Sources: American Lawyers in a Changing Society, Maxwell Bloomfield, 1976 (Harvard Press)
“The ‘True Lawyer’ in America: Discursive Construction of the Legal Profession in the Nineteenth Century.” Philip Gaines, The American Journal of Legal History (April 2001)
“Lawyers, Fees, and Anti-Lawyer Sentiments in Popular Art, 1800-1925,” Michael Hoeflich, The Green Bag (Winter 2001)
Sources of the History of the American Law of Lawyering, ed. Michael Hoeflich, 2007 (Lawbook Exchange)- this is mainly primary sources (speeches/writing/etc by nineteenth century lawyers) on the beginnings of American legal ethics and the US legal profession