Questioning lawyers’ concentration in Congress | Durham Herald Sun

Congratulations to The Herald-Sun for Ray Gronberg’s excellent front page piece on UNC’s Civil Rights Center. “Vindicating promised rights in court is what lawyers do,” wrote Martin Brinkley, dean of UNC-Chapel Hill School of Law.

Moreover, there’s a heightened ethical responsibility for lawyers to help citizens who are unable to pay.

Despite this, as stated in the article, a relatively small percentage of the state’s lawyers report having provided the 50 hours of pro bono legal services for needy clients required by the North Carolina Bar Association.

One wonders what it would look like if the 43 percent of the members of the United States Congress who are lawyers legislated with more of an eye to helping the country’s neediest.

The advisability of such a high concentration of lawyers in the federal halls of power could reasonably be questioned, for that is not representative of America’s demographics.

Might legislation from Washington be fairer all around if the myriad professions found in our cities and towns were to be represented in its chambers? How might this be effected democratically?