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The High Priests of American Politics: The Role of Lawyers in American Political Institutions . By Miller Mark C.. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. 228p. $30.00.

Does it make any difference that nearly half the U.S. Congress and large percentages of other elected officeholders are lawyers? The "conventional wisdom," gleaned from behavioral analyses of roll-call voting patterns, says that it does not. Mark Miller, in The High Priests of American Politics, presents a persuasive case for reevaluating that view. Using a neoinstitutional analysis and data gathered from interviews with members and staff of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Ohio, Massachusetts, Maryland, and North Carolina legislatures, Miller sets out to explain how the attitudes of lawyers affect the very structure of public policymaking in the United States and yield a government "preoccupied with the procedurally oriented, incrementalist myth of rights, instead of with broader substantive questions of public policy" (p. 174). The conventional view Miller rebuts is rooted in Eulau and Sprague's 1964 study, Lawyers in Politics, which found that lawyer and nonlawyer legislators displayed little difference in roll-call voting. By focusing narrowly on voting, Miller contends, "Eulau and Sprague and other behavioralist studies have missed . . . the very real effects that lawyer-politicians have on the internal political culture of [Congress], and on the practices of the institution" (p. 170). The relevant question for political scientists interested in the legislative process is not whether lawyer legislators vote differently, but whether the legislative process itself is the product of the liberal legal ideology embraced by the legal profession. After a brief introductory chapter explaining new institutional analyses, Miller turns in chapter 2 to a discussion of how the training and professional socialization of lawyers produce a uniform world view, an ideology of legal liberalism that stays with the individual throughout his or her political life. That world view includes a "positivist rationality" and a belief in the "myth of rights" and "liberal procedural democracy." These latter tenets of the legal ideology, in particular, lead to a cramped, individualistic, and incrementalist view of democracy that crowds out considerations of broader social good that would otherwise lead to radical social reform (pp. 23-7). Having discussed what it means to "think like a lawyer," Miller examines in chapter 3 the various roles lawyers play in the public policymaking process (as judges, legislators, lobbyists, chief executives, heads of administrative agencies, academics, and private litigators) and how they numerically dominate the nation's elective institutions. In 1988, 45% of Congress came from the legal profession compared with just 25% of the national legislature in Canada, 16% in Great Britain, 10% in Norway, and only 5% in France and Germany (p. 60). Miller's major contribution, however, comes in the middle four chapters of the book. In chapters 5 and 6 he shows how the attitudes and career paths of lawyer legislators are different from those of nonlawyers. Lawyers are more likely to be elected early and stay in office longer, to be more ambitious and run for higher office, to rise to positions of leadership in the legislature, and to view their role in terms of a "trustee" rather than a "delegate" or a "politico." They also hold different attitudes about the courts compared to nonlawyers. They view the courts in more positive terms, are less likely to see judicial decisions as politically biased, and are likely to pay more attention to court decisions. In addition, they are less likely to think there should be routine legislative responses to adverse court decisions or to punish the courts through such measures as jurisdiction-stripping legislation. In chapters 7 and 8, Miller discusses how these behavioral and attitudinal differences affect both the substance and process of legislation. He begins by presenting a typology of lawyer legislators: "nominal legislators" (who continue to practice law while serving as part-time legislators), "nominal lawyers" (full-time legislators who practiced law less than five years prior to their election), and "real lawyers" (full-time legislators who practiced law for more than five years prior to their election). Legislative policymaking, Miller argues, is influenced by both the quantity and quality (or type) of lawyer legislators in a given body. In chapter 7 he discusses how court reform efforts in Massachusetts during the early 1990s were thwarted by "nominal legislators," who were more likely than other lawyers and nonlawyers to see court reform as an attack on their personal financial and political interests. Likewise, in chapter 8 he traces differences in the operating cultures of three different congressional committees to the number and type of lawyers on them.