There’s something good to be said for lawyers, and Hastings Rashdall tells it:
Law was the leading faculty in by far the greater number of medieval universities: for a very large proportion of university students the study of arts, in so far as they pursued it at all, took the place of a modern school rather than of a modern university. From a broad political and social point of view one of the most important results of the universities was the creation, or at least the enormously increased power and importance, of the lawyer-class. Great as are the evils which society still owes to lawyers, the lawyer-class has always been a civilizing agency. Their power represents at least the triumph of reason and education over caprice and brute force. Lawyers have moderated or regulated despotism even when they have proved its most willing tools: just as in modern democratic communities their prominence must be looked upon as an important conservative check upon democracy.
(Quoted from page 708 of The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, by Hastings Rashdall. The Clarendon Press, 1895.)
For a brief biography of Hastings Rashdall, click here.
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