Can I Just Like My Lawyer Instead?

Last Friday was "Love Your Lawyer Day" an event held annually on the first Friday in November.  I can't believe I missed the tickertape parades and the parties in the street.  Indeed it took a mention from my employers (not coincidentally lawyers) to inform me that the day actually existed.

Love Your Lawyer Day was inaugurated by the American Lawyers Public Image Association when they realised that everyone hated lawyers.  Since people have hated lawyers for centuries and the ALPIA only instituted the day in 2001 I think we may have some indication of what the problem is.

I must confess I have the same view of lawyers that I have of guns.  That is, lawyers don't kill people.  People who hire lawyers kill people.  Or something along those lines.  Of course in an ideal society we would have no requirement for either guns or lawyers (or police officers, sheriffs, county clerks, advocacy bodies, prison officers, judges, parking inspectors, ticket collectors, dog catchers, park rangers, soldiers, regulatory bodies or fair trading commissions).  In fact I think one of the principal hallmarks of utopia will be mass unemployment.

But back to lawyers.  It's a little sad when an organisation has to arrange its own celebration.  So I thought I would help out by highlighting in my own modest (and wildly inaccurate way) a lawyer to be proud of.  I have to go back a fair way of course.  To the thirteenth century to be precise.  Step forward please Saint Ivo of Kermartin. 

Ivo was a lawyer and a churchman plus a member of the minor gentry or the French equivalent.  He studied civil law at the University of Paris and subsequently studied canon law at Orleans.  Appointed as an ecclesiastical judge he gained such a reputation for impartiality and integrity that the poor loved him even when he decided against them and the powerful disliked him even when he decided for them.  He was famous for not accepting bribes and for encouraging out of court settlements despite the reduction in income for lawyers this caused.

In addition to his job he provided, free civil and ecclesiastic legal advice to those who could not afford it and represented the poor in both courts and gained a reputation as a champion of the poor.  Actually he was a champion of the law it was just that the poor were so used to being screwed over that when someone came along who stopped that they thought he was on their side.

Ivo was canonised (and back in the days when that actually meant something, not in batches of a hundred like they seem to do nowadays) and has been made the patron saint of lawyers and the legal profession.  He's also the patron saint of abandoned children although I'm not entirely sure where that comes from.

Across Ivo's tomb is written (in Latin) "Here lies a lawyer and an honest man.  To the astonishment of the people."

So, love your lawyer, give them a hug.  Encourage them in their profession and in their good deeds.  Given the correct encouragement it isn't completely beyond the bounds of possibility that one day the legal profession may throw up another person like Ivo of Kermartin.