Today, a good lawyer is understood to be someone familiar with a certain body of knowledge related to the law, and who possesses the skills necessary to put that knowledge into practice. People are less likely to see excellence in the legal profession requiring a commitment to a certain way of life that makes demands on the lawyer’s character, motivations, and aspirations. However, at one time, that commitment was considered essential to professionalism and to achieving excellence in the law. Formation was the process by which lawyers were introduced to this way of life, and no legal education was complete without it.

　　As the etymology of the word suggests—and as most who use the term today forget—professionalism originally referred to one who professes, that is, to one who makes a free public declaration to devote himself to a way of life in service of some higher good. Usually, this took the form of swearing an oath. A vestige of this meaning persists in the ritual swearing of an oath that marks an individual’s admittance to the bar. The oath meant that becoming a lawyer involved not just the acquisition of knowledge and skills but also a willingness to devote oneself to a way of life based upon the law.

　　Legal education reflected this understanding of what it meant to be a lawyer. A legal education included more than just doctrines and skills. It also included formation, that is, an explicit attempt to influence the character of aspiring lawyers by inculcating certain practices and habits of thought and emotion that were believed to be necessary for excellence.

　　This attempt at formation is evident in David Hoffman’s Course of Legal Study, a popular and well-respected guide to the study of law in the early nineteenth century. Admitted to the bar in 1810, Hoffman was the son of a successful merchant family that had immigrated to Maryland from Germany. He developed a successful law practice in Baltimore early in his career and was appointed a professor of law at the University of Maryland in 1814, though he did not begin his lectures there until 1825. By the 1830s, he largely abandoned his law practice to give attention exclusively to academic and literary topics, including further legal studies in Europe at the University of Oxford and Gottingen. In his day, few law schools existed in the United States. The first, at Harvard, was established in 1817. Instead of going to law school, the most common path to the bar was to apprentice oneself to a practicing lawyer and “read” the law. Hoffman’s Course was a guide to the aspiring lawyer’s self-study. Most of the Course consisted of lists of readings that should be studied, with annotations that suggested certain topics and questions that should be considered.

　　But Hoffman knew that the aspiring lawyer needed more than knowledge; he also needed to become a virtuous person. “To be great in the law, it is essential that we should be great in every virtue,” he maintained. Virtue was needed, he insisted, not only to know the theory of the law but also to implement it in practice, for law “employs in its theory the noblest faculties of the soul, and exerts in its practice, the cardinal virtues of the heart.”Without virtue, the neophyte could not access the subtleties of the law nor provide prudent guidance for its implementation. Moreover, a firm foundation of virtue would help lawyers resist corruption throughout their careers. As a result, Hoffman’s Course aimed to form the character of lawyers so that they possessed the virtues necessary for excellence in the law.

　　An important aspect of this formation was presenting the law as something worthy of devotion. After all, if the students’ service to the law was to have a strong influence on their lives, it was important for them to understand its value and importance and not merely view it as a way to make a living. The proem to the Course stated explicitly, “He who aspires to a thorough acquaintance with the legal science should cultivate the most enlarged ideas of its transcendent dignity, its vital importance, its boundless extent, and its infinite variety,” and included many encomiums to the law from both “ancients and moderns.” Hoffman contrasted this exalted view with a more restricted understanding, which saw the law as “a mere collection of positive rules and institutions” and “unconnected series of decrees and ordinances.” This lower view was to be avoided.

　　Hoffman advocated prayer as a practice to form a lawyer. The Course included a prayer that a student of the law was encouraged to pray before his studies every day. This prayer was penned by Samuel Johnson, the famous English essayist and critic and was intended for a Protestant Christian. Through it, the student was reminded of the need for God’s help “to attain such knowledge” as would enable him “to direct the doubtful, and instruct the ignorant, to prevent wrongs, and terminate contentions.” The student could not, it would seem, attain this knowledge on his own.

　　Also included in Hoffman’s Course were biographies of lawyers. The Course listed works regarding the lives of eminent lawyers of Rome, Greece, Great Britain, and America. These could shed light on the “legal character, notions, and revolutions of their age,” but their greatest benefit was formative. They presented models that could be emulated; they suggested the proper “sentiments” to be experienced and helpful “maxims” to be practiced. After reading these biographies, Hoffman said, “We rise from our book with more love for knowledge, more respect for genius, more resolution to be diligent, more confidence in the success of exertion.” The encounters with these great lawyers instilled in the student “a thousand times more ardour than [could] ever be communicated by precept.”

　　The most obvious instruments of formation in Hoffman’s Course were two sets of resolutions. One was a set of Student’s Resolutions, thirty in number, for the aspiring lawyer. The second consisted of fifty “Resolutions in regard to Professional Deportment,” usually referred to as Hoffman’s “50 Resolutions.” These were for practicing lawyers. In both cases, the resolutions were set forth in the first person—“I am hereby resolved”—thereby inviting the reader to make them his own. And in both cases, the resolutions were designed to instill habits and practices to form character.

　　Many changes in the legal profession over the last century or so have left the leadership of the legal profession uninterested in, or unsure of, the formation appropriate for lawyers. This does not mean that lawyers are not formed.

　　The Student’s Resolutions instilled disciplines that addressed various aspects of a student’s life. Many promoted good physical health. Under these, the student resolved to “take exercise,” “adhere to [his] hours of sleep,” and “preserve [his] health of body and mind, by a careful observance of all physical necessities and comforts.” Others addressed the aspiring lawyer’s position in the community. Under these, he resolved to “be moderate, but never mean, in [his] expenses,” “avoid all eccentricity” and “dress fairly in the fashion, but never beyond [his] means, and studiously to shun foppery.” Most guided the student about moral matters. Among other things, students were “to avoid intimate association with young men of doubtful principles”; “to pay cash for everything, and rather to deny [themselves] a present gratification to be a debtor”; and “to rely mainly on [their] industry, however great may be [their] talents.”

　　The original version of Hoffman’s Course did not include the 50 Resolutions. Hoffman assumed that anyone who had studied the law enough to become a practicing lawyer would need no more instruction regarding the proper way to order his life. The principles of the law would provide all the guidance that should be needed. But as more and more people—all men at this point—became lawyers, from various backgrounds with different understandings of the law, Hoffman was encouraged to provide explicit guidance for practicing lawyers. In response, the later versions of his Course included the 50 Resolutions.

　　The 50 Resolutions resemble the rules that were created to order a religious life lived in community, such as the Rule of Saint Augustine and Saint Benedict. Just as these rules were intended to help the members of these communities pursue an ascetic life devoted to God, the 50 Resolutions were intended to help lawyers pursue a disciplined life devoted to the law. Underlying the Resolutions was the recognition that achieving excellence in the law was a difficult task. Lawyers could expect to face many situations that would distract them from the law. The Resolutions attempted to help lawyers by identifying these temptations, warning of their dangers, and recommending practices that would reduce the likelihood that a lawyer would succumb to their attractions.

　　For example, greed was one of the greatest temptations for lawyers. Resolution 49 explicitly warned of its dangers: “Avarice is one of the most dangerous and disgusting of vices.” It would, Hoffman maintained, “contaminate every pure and honorable principle.” Unless a lawyer eradicated its first signs within himself, he would find that it would eventually degrade him and make him “callous to all the nicer feelings.” Under this resolution, a lawyer would resolve “to entertain no affection for money, further than as a means of obtaining the goods of life.”

　　Under other resolutions, a lawyer would resolve to observe practices that would diminish the temptation of greed. Under Resolution 26, for example, a lawyer would resolve not “to blend with” his own, his client’s money: “If kept distinctly as his, it will be less liable to be considered as [the lawyer’s].” Similarly, under other resolutions, the lawyer resolved not to run up a bill by ignoring the client’s wish to settle a claim, not to retain a client’s funds for an unreasonable period and not to charge unreasonable fees.

　　The Resolutions identified other temptations, like anger, laziness, envy, and cowardliness, and prescribed practices to guard against them, such as not seeking vengeance against other lawyers, responding to other lawyers promptly, and pursuing a client’s claim with zeal, even in the face of ridicule and sarcasm from other lawyers.

　　Hoffman knew that avoiding these temptations would require discipline. The last of the 50 Resolutions was a resolution to read the other forty-nine resolutions twice each year during the lawyer’s professional life.

　　Hoffman’s Course and the 50 Resolutions would probably have been long forgotten by now if not for their influence on the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, which all fifty states have adopted in some form. Many of the Rules can be traced back to one or more of the Resolutions.

　　Still, the Resolutions are very different in form and spirit from the Rules. The Resolutions were intended to form lawyers for excellence. In contrast, the Rules are essentially regulations that govern the business of providing legal services—a worldwide industry that is estimated to exceed $1 trillion. In this sense, they are no different than the regulations that govern banks, hospitals, and electric companies. A failure to comply can result in punishment or shut down the business.

　　The conversion of the Resolutions into regulations reflects many changes in the legal profession over the last century or so that have left the leadership of the legal profession uninterested in, or unsure of, the formation appropriate for lawyers. This does not mean that lawyers are not formed. Law schools, law firms, and bar associations inevitably form lawyers, one way or another. The difference is that, in the past, whether lawyers were trained through self-study courses like Hoffman’s or in a law school, this formation was done intentionally, with a goal of instilling the high ideals of the institution served, while today the formation is less intentional and the ideals less clear, if they exist at all.

　　In his 2020 book, A Time to Build, Yuval Levin attributed much of the ineffectiveness and mistrust of institutions today to their failure to form their members for socially important ends. If he’s right—and we think he is—reclaiming the tradition of formation will be key to making them more effective and worthy of our trust in the future.