Daily Inspiration Quote by Derek Bok

A lawyer calling his own trade "the oldest of the arts and the youngest of the professions" is a neat piece of institutional shade dressed up as praise. Derek Bok, the long-serving Harvard president who came to academia through the law, knows exactly what he is doing: elevating law’s cultural pedigree while quietly questioning its moral maturity.

The line works because it splits the difference between craft and credential. "Art" implies improvisation, persuasion, performance - the human habit of arguing our way out of trouble is ancient, older than courts, older than written codes. Bok nods to that lineage: the lawyer as rhetorician, mediator, storyteller, someone who can arrange facts into a narrative that will move a room. It’s flattering, and it’s true enough to land.

Then comes the twist: "youngest of the professions". Profession here isn’t job; it’s a social contract - a group claiming specialized knowledge, self-regulation, and a duty beyond profit. Bok’s subtext is that law, despite its antiquity as practice, is still relatively new to the idea of professional ethics as a binding identity. Modern bar associations, standardized legal education, and licensing regimes are recent inventions, and the public still suspects lawyers of behaving like hired guns in a costume of civic virtue.

In the context of Bok’s career - navigating elite institutions, public trust, and the uneasy marriage of idealism and incentives - the sentence becomes a warning: law has always been skilled at winning arguments. The harder task, and the newer one, is earning legitimacy.