Philosophers Who Were Also Lawyers
Thrasymachus (around 459–400 b.c.e.)
At one point or another, every student of philosophy reads Plato’s dialogue Republic, where Socrates and a few younger guys try to define justice.
In Book I of the Republic Socrates matches wits with a sophist named Thrasymachus who argues that injustice is “stronger, freer, and more masterful” than justice primarily because injustice is “what profits a man’s self and is for his advantage.” Socrates tries to get Thrasymachus to see that acting unjustly actually isn’t to your advantage because it leads to a disordered, paranoid, pathological personality—basically, people will recognize that you’re an unjust jerk and they’ll either shun you or try to take you down. Thrasymachus taught budding politicians and noblemen in Athens how to use rhetoric to win arguments in law courts and citizen assemblies, and a good many sophists themselves were lawyers, too.
Sophists usually get a bad rap primarily because philosophers like Plato and Aristotle characterized them as money-grubbing, self-serving, truth-twisting jerks lacking in moral fiber. Maybe it does makes sense, then, that they were lawyers, huh?
Protagoras (around 490–420 b.c.e.)
This sophist is famous for having said, “Man is the measure of all things” implying that what is true or false, right or wrong, or even up or down is wholly dependent upon a person’s perspective. And further, there are as many different perspectives about reality as there are different persons. You might say he was one of the first relativists.
Protagoras was also famous because, of all the sophists alive during his time, he supposedly charged the most money for his rhetorical teaching services. It’s easy to see how getting a jury to believe that “it’s all a matter of perspective” could help you win your case—provided, of course, that you can convince them to buy your perspective. Plato and Aristotle portray Protagoras in a negative light (you can tell they both friggin’ hated him) with Aristotle claiming that he had a knack for “making the weaker argument appear stronger.”
Demosthenes (384–322 b.c.e.)
This fellow could be considered the Godfather of Oration in the Western world. He was a lawyer, statesman, speechwriter, and a bit of a philosopher in Athens, being revered by other well-known orators such as Plutarch, Quintillian, and Cicero.
From about 357 B.C.E., Philip of Macedonia and the Macedonians were formally at war with Athens, and Demosthenes took it upon himself to be Philip’s biggest opponent, regularly pontificating about the king being a menace, monster, and tyrant. This didn’t go over very well, obviously, and although Philip’s son, Alexander the Great, never got the chance to execute Demosthenes, his successor, Antipater, almost did. We say almost because Demosthenes poisoned himself before he could be captured by Antipater. The Liechtenstein Museum in Vienna, Austria has the Herm of Demosthenes, a stone sculpture with the head of Demosthenes and a vertically oriented rectangular torso on which can be found a stone version of Demosthenes’ genitalia. That’s all there is to it—head, rectangle, and his junk. And apparently it was really, really, really, really cold the day the sculpture was made.
Cicero (106-43 b.c.e.)
Not only is this the name of the Chicago suburb where Rob Arp grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, but this is also the name of one of the most important philosopher-lawyers in Western history. Actually, his full name is Marcus Tullius Cicero and many writers throughout history have referred to him (somewhat affectionately, at times) as “Tully.”
“Tully” was a Roman statesman living during the reign of Julius Caesar and, after JC’s assassination on the Ides of March in 44 B.C.E., he and Mark Antony became the biggest political hotshots in ancient Rome. However, Cicero disliked Antony, and over the course of a year wrote fourteen speeches attacking Antony called the Philippics hoping to oust the Big MA from power. This backfired, however, and Antony had Cicero’s head and hands cut off and nailed to the rostra in the Roman Forum for all to see.
Robert Radford has noted that Cicero is a “sterling example of the rare combination of political power and philosophical wisdom in a single person.” It may be that Cicero was the closest thing to a Philosopher King any society has every seen. However, Cicero did famously state that, “to study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die.”
Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus, a.k.a. Plutarch (46–120)
Plutarch was a Greek philosopher, priest at Delphi, magistrate in Chaeronea, and historian who wrote The Lives of the Roman Emperors from Augustus to Vitellius and a clever piece titled, Parallel Lives, which consists of biographies of famous Greeks and Romans—including Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Mark Antony, and Cicero—that are laid out in “parallel” to show common traits of virtues as well as vices.
Choice quotations about virtue and vice from Plutarch include: “Character is long-standing habit,” “A few vices are sufficient to darken many virtues,” and “Courage consists not in hazarding without fear; but being resolutely minded in a just cause.” Although, this one’s pretty clever: “I don’t need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.”
Ibn Rushd, a.k.a. Averroes (1126–1198)
Averroes was a Muslim philosopher who contributed greatly to the revival of Aristotle’s philosophy in the West, specifically with his Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. He wrote philosophy in his spare time, actually, as his primary job was as a jurist in Cordova, Spain. His grandfather, Abdul-Walid Muhammad, and his father, Abdul-Qasim Ahmad, both held the position of Chief Judge of Cordova.
Not only was Averroes an accomplished lawyer and philosopher, he was also a doctor who wrote two works, Kitab al-Kulyat fi al-Tibb and Kitab al-Taisir fi al-Mudawat wa al-Tadbir, which would act as the main medical textbooks for Muslims, as well as Jews and Christians in medical schools until the early Enlightenment.
Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
Most people know this name from history class because it’s synonymous with the roots of the scientific method. And, people wrongly attribute the saying, “Knowledge is power” to Bacon. Bacon never said this in writing, but Bacon’s friend Thomas Hobbes said something similar in his work titled, Elementorum philosophiae sectio prima De corpore: “The end of knowledge is power.”
It’s true that Bacon made important strides in modern science and the philosophy of science; but he was also a popular English lawyer during his lifetime. In fact, he was part of the legal team that found Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, guilty of treason after Devereux’s failed coup d’état against the English throne. In a bizarre twist of fate, the guy who was pardoned by Devereux and became a professional executioner is the same guy who chopped Devereux’s head off in the Tower of London—after three attempts.
Hugo Grotius (1583–1645)
Grotius was a jurist and philosopher known for his defense of the Christian God’s laws as a basis for natural laws that, in turn, act as the basis for human laws in societies. “What God has shown to be His Will,” claims Grotius, “that is law. This axiom points directly to the cause of law, and is rightly laid down as the primary principle.”
So, murder is illegal in any society not merely because it’s immoral through natural law, but ultimately because it’s sinful through God’s law as laid down in the Ten Commandments. Grotius also made important strides in the development of international law and morality, especially regarding war. In fact, basic principles of his De iure belli ac pacis libri tres (On the Law of War and Peace) are still taught and adhered to by Western societies today. Supposedly, Gustavus Adolphus—king of Sweden from 1611 to 1632—kept a copy of the Bible and Grotius’s De iure belli ac under his pillow.
Before he was “thinking, therefore being” Descartes actually received a law degree in 1616 from the University of Poitiers in France. He went straight into the military after that, then traveled a lot to places like Bohemia, Hungary, and Germany before settling down in Holland in 1628 where he remained mostly for the next twenty years.
Although everyone has heard of Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am,” almost no one knows that Descartes is the father of classical analytic geometry. We all learned about the Cartesian co-ordinate x-y system in algebra classes in grade school—well, Cartesian is the adjectival form of Descartes. Descartes invented the whole thing.
Descartes was known to be kind of a sickly person who spent a lot of time in bed—mostly to sleep until 11:00 A.M. daily, but a lot of the time because he was actually ill. (In fact, Descartes died of pneumonia way too young supposedly because for a year he would get up at 5:00 A.M. to tutor Queen Christina of Sweden.) One story goes that while Descartes was in bed one morning, he thought of the x-y system as he watched a butterfly slowly flutter past a set of French doors—which have slats that form numerous crosses in the doors from top to bottom—in a kind of wave pattern. Descartes then probably said to himself, or even out loud, “Voilà!” (that’s French for “There it is!”) and numbers were put together with spatial relations like never before.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716)
High-school kids take algebra classes too, usually along with geometry, then trigonometry, then calculus. Other than being known as a famous rationalist philosopher in the wake of Descartes, Leibniz was a lawyer and, in many ways, we owe the modern form of codified law to his legal writings and work. However, Leibniz never intended for his philosophy of law to be turned into law codified in books.
Leibniz and Isaac Newton each independently invented calculus (for Rob, in high school it was more like cal-clueless because he totally sucks at math). This guy was a total genius who got his law degree in only one year and also invented the mechanical calculator and refined the binary system of numbers that acts as the basis for modern digital computation. One famous philosophical idea that derives from Leibniz is the principle of the identity of indiscernibles, which states that two things are identical to one another (not discernible from one another) if they have all of their properties in common. So, if Clark Kent and Superman share all of the same properties, then they’re the same guy. The same goes for Diana Prince and Wonder Woman, as well as basically anything defined in a standard dictionary like vixen and female fox, as well as bachelor and unmarried male. Oh, and a great-tasting German butter biscuit is named after Leibniz—you gotta try the Choco Leibniz . . . Yum!
Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu . . . or Simply Montesquieu (1689–1755)
Montesquieu was a political philosopher and lawyer in Bordeaux, France, most famous for advocating the separation of governmental powers in his De l’esprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws). Taking ideas from John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689) as a starting point, Montesquieu argues that the government of a society should be separated into executive, legislative, and judicial bodies, so that they “check” and “balance” one another in an attempt to curb potential violations of individual rights, favoritism, corruption, and most importantly, tyranny that invariably comes with the executive body (the king or queen) having too much power in a society.
“There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice,” claimed Montesquieu. Needless to say, this idea didn’t go over well in eighteenth-century Europe where kings, queens, and popes thought they had a “divine right” to their despotic rule, and in 1751 the Catholic Church added De l’esprit des lois to its Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Prohibited Books).
Still, Montesquieu’s work was widely read and became incredibly influential for all modern forms of constitutional monarchies and republics, including the UK and the USA. Thomas Jefferson, himself a lawyer, used De l’esprit des lois and Second Treatise of Government as blueprints for the US’s Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
Bentham changed the face of ethical decision making by offering one of the best defenses of utilitarianism, which is a theory stating that the morally correct decision is the one that maximizes the pleasure, benefits, or good consequences for all persons affected by it. Bentham’s student, John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), further refined utilitarianism, and his name is most often associated with the theory.
One implication of utilitarianism is that the end of bringing about these good consequences can justify employing less-than-good means to achieve all of this good. Consider the hubbub about the US employing waterboarding and other forms of torture in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. People who think like utilitarians would say that the end of finding and stopping terrorists justifies the torturing of folks who know where these terrorists are located.
Bentham got a law degree in 1769, but never practiced. He proposed something called a panopticon (Greek for “all seeing”), a prison designed like a big cylinder with the inmates in cells all around the edge while guards were situated in a center hub with the ability to see them constantly, twenty-four-seven. The idea being that if you’re always watched, you’ll learn to act civilly—in Bentham’s own words, it is a “mill for grinding rogues honest.” If you want to read about—and see—something creepy, look up what was done with Bentham’s body after he died.
H.L.A. Hart (1907–1992)
Hart followed many of Bentham’s ideas concerning legal philosophy and, in 1961, published The Concept of Law, which is widely regarded as a seminal work in legal positivism. According to legal positivists, a legal system in some society is based on social rules and norms that are actually practiced.
Leslie Green writes that, according to legal positivists, law is “a matter of what has been posited (ordered, decided, practiced, tolerated, etc.)” As opposed to almost every legal philosopher since Plato who have argued that laws are grounded in some kind of natural or divine law, legal positivists maintain that laws are wholly social constructs.
Legal positivism can go hand-in-hand with ethical relativism, the thesis that what is morally right or wrong is wholly dependent upon your social circumstances and, hence, what’s right in the USA can be wrong in some fundamentalist theocratic nation and vice versa. For example, in the USA it’s morally wrong to deny a woman a fair trial if she shows up at the courthouse accusing a man of raping her, and also morally wrong for a mob to stone her to death out behind the courthouse for making the accusation. However, the same actions may be morally right in the fundamentalist theocratic nation and, according to the ethical relativist, this is all fine and dandy.
If laws are wholly social constructs too, as the legal positivists maintain, then apparently the fundamentalist theocratic nation can actually make it legal to deny the woman her right to a trial and stone her. Sounds strange, doesn’t it?
Ronald Dworkin (1931–2013)
According to law as integrity, propositions of law are true if they figure in or follow from the principles of justice, fairness, and procedural due process that provide the best constructive interpretation of the community’s legal practice.” So maintained Ronald Dworkin in Law’s Empire (1986), a seminal work in contemporary legal philosophy.
Anyone who studies American law, political philosophy, or legal philosophy is familiar with Dworkin’s writings and his theory, law as integrity. Dworkin was one of Hart’s students and actually offered a critique of Hart’s legal positivism. If you read the previous paragraph, Dworkin would probably say that the principles of justice, fairness, and procedural due process can be applied cross-culturally to make it such that it’s illegal to deny a woman her right to a trial and stone her. You need not appeal to nature or some god when recognizing that things like justice, fairness, and procedural due process should ground laws.