The Coercion of Images

Why is it, when lawyers and sociologists confront one another -- though they would scarcely do so save peripherally if they were not in some measure marginal in their own guilds -- that they do so as "representative men" of each? By assuming that their opposite number is central in his discipline, do they seek a firmer identity in their own? There is a tendency to talk about the law, the lawyer, the sociologist, very much as Americans abroad can hardly help being viewed as the American. It seems to me that mutual acculturation might begin with a more pluralistic set of images.

Sociologists tend to put lawyers in the role of the model lawyer, with a model constituency of people and problems. As seen from within, however, the legal profession is striking for the amorphousness of its boundaries, in comparison with the image of the "real doctor" operative among medically trained people. The ideal of the "real doctor" is so coercive an image that a man who, let us say, is an M.D. and a pathologist, or an M.D. and a hospital administrator, or an M.D. and a public health man, or even an M.D. and a research clinician who does not have direct dealings with patients, is not considered fully a doctor. He is apt to feel bad about it, and to make the same sort of apologies that a dean may make to professors about being a dean. To be sure, lawyers do not completely lack comparably coercive images. One finds them operative in house counsel (that is, full-time salaried employees of an insurance company or other corporation) who feel themselves not quite lawyers, not quite independent professionals; one finds them occasionally in the government lawyer who has never tried a case and never had any of the appurtenances of starting at the bottom, but who went straight from law school to the FCC; one finds them in the law professor who is at once pleased and a bit embarrassed if somebody brings him a trespass case or divorce case (I am talking of course about the full-time law professor), giving him the feeling that he has been initiated as a real lawman.

Sociologists have often operated with an image of lawyers as men concerned with sanctions, with the enforcement of rules. This all too uncomplicated definition must make the lawman restive. For, as already indicated, the law-trained person is likely to be found almost anywhere in the American social structure.