A minor point, returning to Michael's original comment raising the question of what distinguishes lawyers from novelists and journalists: I think when we say a lawyer is someone who makes things happen using words what we have to mean is that a lawyer is someone with a law license who makes things happen using words in some way connected to that license.

For example, if a person with a law license wrote a magazine feature article intending to change public views to be more in line with interests of a client seeking to change the law, would that be lawyering? Sure, I'd say--it's done to represent a client that one's law license allows one to have. If a public relations consultant did it, it wouldn't be lawyering, even though the article may be the same.

I don't think we have to be troubled by the fact that this doesn't make the category of concrete actions that constitute lawyering entirely disjoint from other categories of concrete actions. It's still useful to talk about how having a law license affects what change one can accomplish in what way with words (and this is for the most part what everyone's been talking about).

-- GregJohnson - 29 Mar 2009