Justice for Whom? Law in America

​Lawyers like to think of themselves as the guardrails of a fair society. The numbers raise a harder question. Nearly half of Congress are lawyers even though the profession makes up less than one percent of the country. The federal rulebook grows by tens of thousands of pages every year. Large companies now spend more on their in-house legal teams than the entire nation spends on civil legal aid. And while elite firms keep setting revenue records, more than seventy percent of ordinary people with a civil legal problem get no legal help at all. It isn’t a partisan critique. It’s a structural one. The profession built a system that absorbs enormous talent and produces enormous complexity, yet most of that talent flows toward the institutions with the least vulnerability. Tonight is about sitting with and unpacking that tension.