"We are more casual about qualifying the people we allow to act as advocates in the courtroom than we are about licensing electricians"
About this Quote
Burger’s line lands because it drags the legal profession out of its self-mythologizing and drops it into the blunt world of consumer safety. Electricians are licensed because bad wiring burns down houses. Burger’s provocation is that bad lawyering can burn down lives, yet the system often treats competence in court as a matter of tradition, pedigree, or mere bar membership rather than demonstrable skill.
The intent is reformist and managerial: a judge frustrated by uneven advocacy signaling that the courtroom is not a sacred stage for amateur hour. Coming from Burger - the Chief Justice who spent years pushing “modernization” of courts and championing continuing legal education - the remark is less a throwaway insult than a policy argument for higher entry standards, specialization, and accountability. He’s saying the state already knows how to regulate high-stakes labor; it simply chooses not to apply that rigor to lawyers.
The subtext is a quiet indictment of legal exceptionalism. The profession polices itself, and the threshold for being “qualified” to represent someone can be shockingly low compared with other regulated trades. Burger also hints at class dynamics: society tends to romanticize white-collar expertise while treating blue-collar licensing as obvious and necessary. By flipping the comparison, he punctures the prestige bubble around courtroom work.
Context matters: late 20th-century courts were straining under caseloads, and public confidence in institutions was wobbling. Burger’s metaphor translates procedural failure into a tangible risk the public understands, making legal competence feel like infrastructure - invisible when it works, catastrophic when it doesn’t.
The intent is reformist and managerial: a judge frustrated by uneven advocacy signaling that the courtroom is not a sacred stage for amateur hour. Coming from Burger - the Chief Justice who spent years pushing “modernization” of courts and championing continuing legal education - the remark is less a throwaway insult than a policy argument for higher entry standards, specialization, and accountability. He’s saying the state already knows how to regulate high-stakes labor; it simply chooses not to apply that rigor to lawyers.
The subtext is a quiet indictment of legal exceptionalism. The profession polices itself, and the threshold for being “qualified” to represent someone can be shockingly low compared with other regulated trades. Burger also hints at class dynamics: society tends to romanticize white-collar expertise while treating blue-collar licensing as obvious and necessary. By flipping the comparison, he punctures the prestige bubble around courtroom work.
Context matters: late 20th-century courts were straining under caseloads, and public confidence in institutions was wobbling. Burger’s metaphor translates procedural failure into a tangible risk the public understands, making legal competence feel like infrastructure - invisible when it works, catastrophic when it doesn’t.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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