Unguided Tour

THE LAWYERS by Martin Mayer. 586 pages. Harper & Row. $8.95.

As the John Gunther of American professions, Reporter-Author Martin Mayer has previously zipped through The Schools, Madison Avenue, U.S.A.

and Wall Street: Men and Money. Now he has taken on lawyers; and that, as a friend warned him, "is the big leagues."

Well aware of that fact, Mayer spent nearly six years preparing this book, which got to the publisher three years late. But for all his effort, he has mainly heft to show. His book carefully discusses almost every important tree in the legal forest, plus the forest itself.

But Mayer gives few hints of where the paths are, and for a would-be guide, that lack is crippling.

Numbing Facts. From the outset, the reader is assailed with statistics and parenthetical goodies. People who have hired lawyers usually think less well of the profession than people who have not. A juror may not take notes in most courts; he might become too influential in the jury room, and there is no way to control the accuracy of his notes. The U.S. has 300,000 lawyers-far more both proportionately and absolutely than any other country. Surprisingly, they average only $13,000 a year. Contrary to the big-city lawyer image, almost 50% of U.S. lawyers practice in cities or towns of fewer than 200,000 residents. Only one out of 100 lawyers is a Negro. Only one in 40 is a woman. But one in five is a Jew. Though more lawyers are over 70 than under 30, things are changing: the U.S. now has 70,000 law students--a 63% rise in six years.

Unfortunately, the facts are pretty numbing. The Lawyers has not so much been written as it has been compiled; the reader can all but see Mayer doggedly arranging his 3-by-5 index cards so that not one piece of information escapes. The result is an intrusively disjointed style. Paragraphs often do not mesh; chapters hardly ever do. The failing was no doubt exacerbated by the fact that parts of chapters appeared in five magazines as varied as Harper's, Redbook and TV Guide. Still, Mayer needs an editor; he ingests better than he digests. On occasion, he even goofs those facts. Example: there is no such thing as the Yale Law Review. Horrors, it's the Yale Law Journal!

Actually, the only way to make fair sense of American law is to plumb the ramifications of one important case, the strategy so impressively followed by Anthony Lewis in Gideon's Trumpet (1964). Grand surveys usually get nowhere; "law" is almost entirely a case-by-case proposition. As Mayer himself says, "Law is a process, not a thing."

But though he generally skimps on insights, he does his fitful best to sort out many of the key trends and controversies that now roil American law.

Increased rights for defendants, he observes, are having more than "a -few unforeseen effects. For one, "restrictions on the evidence available agafnst the guilty make the guilty-and the innocent look more alike." Today a guilty man is often convicted only because he hires a bad lawyer who cannot keep pace with liberalizing Supreme Court decisions that could well spring his client.

All the same, Author Mayer has come away with more faith in the law than many lawyers. Says he: "The rest of us put up with the arrogance of the lawyers--accept their, rigidities, their partial perceptions, their occasional corruption, their portentous self-praise, their cant, their infernal waste of time --not because we care about the niceties or even the creative accomplishments of the legal system, but because we sense, we hope,' that the law seeks justice."

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