Defenders of the Laissez-Faire Faith and Adherents of Fordist Collectivism: The Changing Relationship Between Lawyers and Society

If the nineteenth century was the era of laissez-faire capitalism in the UK then it was also the era of the laissez-faire lawyer, although, as we shall see, the support of solicitors for laissez-faire was usually contingent upon it materially benefiting them. Between 1700 and the interwar years, solicitors more or less consistently endorsed the right of property-owners to dispose of their property as they saw fit. They generally allied themselves with the wealthy landlord, the commercial elite and the expanding middle class, and they formed a crucial element in the Tory Party’s attempt to establish a coalition between the gentry, the commercial classes and the new middle classes at the turn of this century (Offer 1981). Their adherence to the defence of property rights is hardly surprising, given that solicitors were one of the key groups (if not the key group) to lubricate the transfer of private property in England and Wales. As such, their role as defenders of private property came almost ‘naturally’.