The First Thing We Do Is…
Memories from my first semester of Law School
There is a line from Shakespeare that law students encounter early and carry forever. Most land at it via a lecturer who has watched too many people misread it.
The line is this:
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”.
People who have never studied law tend to quote it with a kind of gleeful satisfaction, as though Shakespeare had finally said out loud what everyone was secretly thinking. A little dig at the profession, a joke at a dinner party or a way of signaling that they are too smart to be impressed by legal credentials.
They have missed the point entirely.
When I first encountered this line in my first semester of law school, the misreading bothered me immediately, in the way that something bothers you when you can see exactly where it goes wrong. I have thought about it regularly ever since.
The Play, The Man, The Context
The line comes from Henry VI, Part 2. Act Four, Scene Two. The play is set during one of England’s more chaotic periods, a moment of political instability, civil war brewing and a man named Jack Cade leading a popular rebellion against the existing order.
Jack Cade is not a hero. He is a demagogue, a populist and a man promising a new world that is really just the old world with himself at the top (sound familiar?). He tells the crowd that when he is king, bread will be free, seven halfpenny loaves will be sold for a penny, the three-hooped pot will have ten hoops and it will be a felony to drink small beer.
He is making promises he cannot keep to people who have very little reason to trust anyone.
But the line is not his.
It belongs to Dick the Butcher.
A follower and a man caught up in the promise of disorder who articulates, in one sentence, the clearest possible understanding of what stands between them and the chaos they are chasing.
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
Dick is not criticising lawyers. He is identifying them as the obstacle and the thing that would have to go first if you wanted to tear down the structures that protect ordinary people from the arbitrary exercise of power.
Shakespeare put the most lucid analysis of the legal profession’s social function into the mouth of a villain, because that is exactly the kind of thing a villain would know.
The lawyers are not the oppressors in this reading. They are the reason the oppression of an unchecked ruler has limits. They are the ones holding the line between a society governed by law and a society governed by whoever is loudest and most willing to make things up.
If you want genuine anarchy, if you want to remove accountability and dismantle the systems that make it possible to hold power to account, the lawyers need to go first.
The Joke That Isn’t
The stories we tell about what lawyers are for shapes the profession that we get.
So if the story is that lawyers are parasites, comedic bureaucrats and necessary evils at best, then we get the legal profession we deserve. One where the best people leave because staying feels like complicity. One where the silence that protects the wrong things goes unbroken because nobody believes there is anything worth protecting. One where the work gets reduced to billing cycles and risk matrices and the actual point of it all gets quietly swallowed whole.
I have written before about why the legal profession eats its own and about the silence that has protected predators at the expense of the people who most needed the profession to show up for them. Both of those things exist alongside this one. They are part of the same picture.
The profession is capable of extraordinary things and it has sometimes been spectacularly bad at being what it claims to be. Both things can be true at the same time.
The misquote flattens that into something simpler and less useful: that lawyers are the problem, rather than that some lawyers, and some systems, have failed the standard the profession sets for itself.
Same Play, Different Stage
I have been writing and talking for a while now about the moment we are in. I said it plainly here and I will say it again now.
The questions that will define the next vital years are ethics and governance questions. They are questions about accountability, about who holds power and under what constraints, about the space between what is technically legal and what is actually just.
AI is restructuring work and institutions faster than the governance frameworks designed to contain it. Trust in public institutions is fractured in ways that look structural rather than cyclical. Bad actors are operating at scale, in public and with confidence, because the systems that would ordinarily create consequences for them are under pressure from multiple directions at once.
Dick the Butcher would feel very at home right now.
Which means the lawyers, the good eggs, the ones who understand what the work is actually for, have never been more needed or more relevant.
The Good Eggs
I want to be precise about who I mean.
The lawyers who did not stop caring when the caring became inconvenient. The ones who understood that the tradition of the law, the accumulated weight of thinking about how humans should treat each other, refined across centuries and tested in real cases with real consequences, is something worth stewarding seriously.
The ones who broke silence when silence would have been safer. The ones who found ways to hold complexity without collapsing it. The ones who stayed connected to the reason they came to law in the first place, even when the system made that difficult for them.
The ones who are mentoring without gatekeeping. Teaching without conditions or cruelty. Sharing the full inheritance with the next generation coming into the profession.
Those lawyers are not naive. They know the dysfunction intimately but they are choosing to do something other than reproduce it.
Shakespeare was writing about them too, whether he knew it or not.
The Inheritance
The lawyers are not going anywhere.
Not because the culture is perfect or the systems are working as they should. They are not. The critique and the care are the same thing. and the critique will keep coming.
They are not going anywhere because the world cannot afford for them to.
What Dick the Butcher understood, what Shakespeare buried in the mouth of a rebel follower four hundred years ago, is that a functioning legal profession is one of the things that stands between ordered society and the chaos that bad actors are always trying to manufacture.
That is not a reason for complacency. It is the exact opposite.
It is the reason the profession needs to be better than it currently is at retaining the right people, protecting the ones who speak up, breaking the silences that have shielded the wrong things for too long and sharing everything it knows with the generation that is going to need it most.
We need collaboration where there has been competition. We need transparency where there has been deliberate obscurity. We need the people already inside this profession who understand its real purpose to act like it.
Shakespeare was onto something.
He usually was.
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