Books

A dialogue a hundred years later. In 1921 Piero Calamandrei gave to the presses Troppi Avvocati!, a pamphlet denouncing the damage that the out-of-control growth of the forensic population was producing for the profession. At the time there were 25,000 lawyers in Italy. Today there are almost 246,000. And the issue of forensic troopism, as Nicola Di Molfetta calls it in his new essay, Quali Avvocati?, continues to hold sway, now screwed to an archaic and stereotypical view of the legal profession and its role in society.

LC Publishing Group returns to bookstores with a work that constitutes a historical reflection on the issue of the oversizing of Italian lawyers. In a single boxed set, the text that Piero Calamandrei published for Giuseppe Prezzolini’s Quaderni della Voce in 1921 is reprinted in an anastatic copy. And, alongside it, appears a new essay entitled Quali Avvocati?, signed by Nicola Di Molfetta.

Calamandrei, a constituent father and one of the most influential jurists of the twentieth century, expressed in his Troppi Avvocati! a criticism aimed at shaking the consciences of a category that was in danger of losing contact with self-awareness because it was overwhelmed by the drudgery of an activity that was increasingly difficult to sustain. A condition very similar to today. The year 2021 has been a record year in terms of lawyer deletions from the bar. So much so that many are wondering if there is a future for the profession.

This question is answered by Di Molfetta, a journalist and expert on the legal services market, author of the essays Business Lawyers and Lex Machine, director of Legalcommunity and MAG. “Lawyers need to reflect on the role the profession can and should play in a socioeconomic context undergoing profound transmutation. Complex. Globalized. Hyper-regulated. And above all, mediatized. A context in which lawyers serve, but not indistinctly.” The category must become aware of its multifaceted nature. “Not all lawyers are equal,” Di Molfetta writes, meaning that 246,000 lawyers cannot all be employed in the performance of the same functions and that to “stop being too many” lawyers must distinguish and specialize. They must become interpreters of the legal needs expressed by society and the economy of their time and organize themselves in the most appropriate ways to respond to them in the most effective and efficient manner.

“Recognition of truth,” wrote the 1921 Calamandrei, “is the first condition of all rebirth. “The mirror, before which the profession has lingered for too long,” Di Molfetta echoes him a century later, “must become a window facing the world and in a useful position to understand its needs and necessities. This is the indispensable condition for the establishment of a new advocacy. Of a useful advocacy.”