A Case of Love, Hate for Lawyers

This is painful. I don’t even know where to begin.

--former prosecutor Marcia Clark

in her memoir, “Without a Doubt”

If you’re repulsed by obscenities, read no further.

Coming up shortly is something so repellent, so loathsome, so odious that it’s risky printing it in a family newspaper. Prepare to be shocked and turn away in disgust, for what you are about to read here is none other than the L-word.

Lawyers.

More reprehensible than even the media, politicians and liberals (the other L-word), lawyers have become the scapegoat of choice during this tortuously prolonged and litigated presidential election being fought in courtrooms by dueling legal teams for Al Gore and George W. Bush.

The public seems to forget at times that in nations of laws, lawyers come with the package. When you’ve legal problems, your first call isn’t to a spot-welder or yoga instructor. You hate lawyers until you need one.

On the media front, the tone of the language often being aimed at lawyers speaks for itself. “Legions of lawyers” have descended on Florida, reported the Fox News Channel. “The lawyers out there . . .” began a CNN reporter checking in from Austin, Texas.

Out everywhere, it’s true, for this lawyerocracy now carpets television nearly wall to wall. Include the crush of talky legal pundits operating on cable’s 24-hour news channels as part of this month’s election coverage. There may now be more lawyers on TV than in law offices, and often they can be found talking to one another.

“You know as a lawyer yourself . . .” Roger Cossack, co-host of CNN’s legal series, “Burden of Proof,” began a discourse recently with CNN political analyst (and non-practicing law school grad) Jeff Greenfield.

On a given night of CNN’s “Larry King Live,” moreover, you might find media-driven lawyers Alan Dershowitz and Gerry Spence ranging over topics from JonBenet Ramsey to Jockey shorts. And such lawyers as Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. and Anita Hill have moonlighted on “Court TV.”

When not just filling space, however, pontificating lawyers have delivered TV that is not only highly watchable but also illuminating during an election whose legal tangles have become ever more curious. That does not include a thin segment on U.S. Supreme Court workings that MSNBC recently slapped together in response to election controversy.

It does include “Burden of Proof” co-host Greta Van Susteren, especially valuable this month in simplifying ever-multiplying arcane points of law and other election issues made incomprehensible by partisan legalspeak.

What a process. “The Practice,” “Law & Order,” “Family Law” and “Judging Amy” it’s not. Which is a great irony, for even as much of the public appears lawyerphobic--finding attorneys to be either Gore’s sourest grapes or obstructionists for Bush--lawyers continue to be bankable as prime-time heroes.

The public has a complex relationship with its lawyers. How is it possible for so many Americans to despise them--as if all were ambulance-chasing gargoyles in shiny suits--while flocking to entertainment programs celebrating attorneys? Can it be their instinctive disgust for the legal profession translates to admiration for the ethically superior lawyers of TV series, just as viewers may welcome the uplifting, angst-ridden idealism of the White House crowd in NBC’s “The West Wing” as refuge from the cynicism of real-life politics?

These conflicting attitudes help shape not only prime time but also daytime television, where Wapner-esque black robes from Judge Judy to Judge Joe Brown proliferate like gratuitous lawsuits, dispensing sharp-tongued justice to multitudes of Americans under the hot lights of TV. If Oliver Wendell Holmes were alive today, he’d be Judge Ollie. When Chief Justice William Rehnquist steps down from the U.S. Supreme Court, he can make a fortune resolving disputes on TV in front of the same shut-ins who watch Oprah Winfrey and Rosie O’Donnell.

Clearly, lawyers who frustrate Americans also fascinate them. Why the dichotomy?

“There’s no doubt that we hate lawyers more today than we ever did before,” said Michael Asimov, a UCLA law professor and co-author of “Reel Justice,” a study of courtroom depictions in movies. “The polling data clearly shows this. Go back 20 or 30 years, and lawyers did better in the polls than politicians and journalists. But they don’t now.”

Not that anyone threw ticker-tape parades for attorneys. Asimov says they were not all that popular even during the height of the civil rights era, when many were identified with positive social change. But he traces their subsequent popularity dive in part to Watergate, “which was all lawyers. And you can follow it through famous trials like O.J. Simpson’s and others.”

And what about those trashy-looking TV ads? “Television advertising [by lawyers] didn’t exist until the late ‘70s, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled they had a 1st Amendment right to do that,” Asimov said. “Now there’s roughly $150 million in advertising on TV by lawyers, most of it about DWI [driving while intoxicated] and inviting you to make up personal injuries. It demeans the profession, and I don’t think the public likes that.”

What Americans like even less this season, it seems, are lawyers becoming point men in elections that drag on and on.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted by e-mail at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.