No. (This, however, is a polemic, and as such I am unfairly neglecting some of the fine work done by some ABA sections.) As a law student, I had an inchoate thought that the ABA could be a kind of strong mediating institution between the state and the individual that would make it beneficial to the public, not just a large lobbying organization protecting the business interests of lawyers. I had a woeful lack of knowledge of the quite sketchy history of the ABA. I thought the ABA could use its organizational heft to improve the quality of applicants to the profession, improve the ethical standards required of all lawyers, and advance the public profession of the law.
One issue of importance to the ABA during my formative years as a lawyer (and even now) was its role in the vetting process for federal court nominees. Having joined the legal profession in 1982, I was quite familiar with the burgeoning culture wars, including their cousin, the judicial appointment wars. I never thought much of the ABA’s efforts to control (or at least channel) judicial selection through its Committee on the Federal Judiciary, particularly after it couldn’t determine, based on its own “non-ideological” criteria, whether Robert Bork was highly qualified, qualified, or a hopeless disaster in the making. I don’t mind the ABA’s efforts to evaluate federal judicial nominees; what bothers me is that it claims to do so as an independent, neutral, unbiased expert.
But neither its history nor its tiresome efforts to wield an oddly refractive kind of political influence is what really bothers me. No, the ABA does harm because it can’t get it right on what should be its two most important areas of concern: legal ethics (this Part) and legal education (Part II).