Many law graduates choose to enter public service rather than private practice. Of the public roles played by members of the legal profession, that of judge is most visible, but the status of judge and the mode of entry into this branch of the profession vary considerably from country to country.

The traditional independence, power, creativity, and prestige of the Anglo-American judge contrast with the status of most Continental judges, which is more akin to that of civil servants, especially at lower levels of the judiciary. In the countries of Anglo-American influence, at least until recently, appointment (or, in some U.S. states, election) to a judgeship has been viewed as the crowning achievement of a long and often distinguished legal career. In the Continental countries, by contrast, a law graduate who wishes to be a judge merely completes a training period and passes an examination to get a job deciding cases. The beginning civil-law judge can expect to start at the lowest level and, like any other civil servant, to rise in the hierarchy through a series of promotions (though a modest number of positions on the highest courts are reserved for distinguished practitioners or professors as well as for career civil servants). Lateral entry into the judiciary at any level is uncommon. It has frequently been observed that, because of their standardized training, civil-law judges tend to share a common outlook. Moreover, because of their concerns about advancement, they tend to adopt a civil-service mentality that may appear, at least from an Anglo-American perspective, to discourage initiative and independence. Any tendency toward judicial individualism is apt to be further inhibited by the fact that Continental judges, even at the lowest levels, usually sit in panels and typically present their decisions in unsigned opinions. Except in a few courts, such as the German Federal Constitutional Court, disagreement among judges is generally not revealed, either in the form of a dissenting opinion or in a record of the judges’ votes.

Since the late 20th century, however, the contrast between Continental and Anglo-American judicial roles has diminished. In the United States the prestige of judgeships, except at the higher levels, has declined somewhat. It is not as unusual as it once was for judges to resign and return to private practice or for eminent lawyers to decline to be considered for judicial positions; relatively low judicial salaries and public scrutiny are often mentioned as key reasons. Meanwhile, in some Continental countries, such as Germany—as well as in other countries with similar systems, including South Korea and Japan—judges are recruited from among the best law graduates and sometimes from among experienced practitioners. Because of their special training, Continental judges are almost uniformly professional and competent.

Governments have always required legal specialists, and the scope for such employment today is enormous. Most countries have a senior political officer—minister of justice, attorney general, solicitor general—who by convention needs to be a lawyer, and a department concerned mainly with the legal problems of the government as client (in the English-derived systems usually the office of the attorney general). Increasingly, however, the great departments of state need their own legal subbranch. In some countries, such as Germany, lawyers dominate the higher offices in the civil service, while in others, such as Japan and France, the various official bureaus are more likely to be staffed, respectively, by law graduates not admitted to practice or by nonlawyers who have been trained in a special school of administration. In the formerly socialist countries of eastern Europe, most lawyers tended to work for government or for collectivized industrial and farm organizations.

One of the oldest and still most difficult of governmental legal functions is that of prosecutor. Prosecution is sometimes in part carried on by private persons acting through private lawyers, but the recent trend has very much been to concentrate the function in government legal officers. In most Commonwealth countries the crown, or public, prosecutor is a specialized officer under the general control of the attorney general. England has an independent “director of public prosecutions” concerned only with the most serious types of crime, but most prosecutions have been conducted by private barristers briefed by him or by the police. A 1985 law, however, provided for the establishment of a body of official prosecutors similar to the public prosecutors (procurators fiscal) of the Scottish system. In the United States this function has come to be mainly local, and prosecutors, whose most common title is district attorney, are elected for short terms.

In most civil-law systems prosecuting is a career service. In Italy and France the prosecutor is a member of the judiciary. Both prosecutors and judges receive the same training, and both may move from one role to the other in the course of their advancement in the civil service. In Germany, although the prosecutor is not technically a member of the judiciary, he is not strictly separate from it, and individuals move easily from one position to the other. In China considerable effort has been made in recent years to distinguish the functions of judge, prosecutor, and defense counsel, but these roles remain in an early stage of development.

The prosecuting function is particularly delicate because criminal prosecution can be used as an instrument of oppression and persecution, even where conviction is not obtained, and because in most systems prosecutors are expected to act with a degree of fairness and restraint not necessarily expected of the parties to civil litigation. Many Romano-Germanic systems employ officers who supervise the working of the courts, especially their criminal jurisdiction. This is the office of the “prosecutor general,” or “officer of justice”; a similar service existed in most of the socialist countries of eastern Europe.

Another branch of government, the legislature, usually requires legal assistance. Legislation needs to be expressed in language readily comprehensible by judges and lawyers and to be framed in harmony with the existing body of law. This requires the service of parliamentary draftsmen who are expert lawyers. A further specialized branch of advisory activity associated with legislation has become prominent—the law-reform commission or committee.

Teaching and scholarship

Since Roman times teaching and scholarship in the law have provided prominent roles in the legal profession. Until the 18th century, teaching of the English common law was vested exclusively in the Inns of Court, and a good deal of continental European teaching for professional practice—particularly in the case of notaries and procurators—was also professionally organized. Even university law teaching in Europe often involved interchange between practitioner and teacher, exemplified in such great figures as the French 18th-century teacher, advocate, and judge Robert Joseph Pothier, whose commentaries provided the foundation for the Napoleonic Code of civil law. Much law teaching in the new university law schools that sprang up in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Commonwealth in the 19th and 20th centuries was initially carried on part-time by attorneys, barristers, and judges, and some still is. Sir William Blackstone, the first holder of a chair of English law—the Vinerian professorship at Oxford—came from the bar and became a judge. Only in the 20th century did law teaching become a distinct, full-time profession, and then to a greater extent in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada than in many civil-law countries.

Teachers and practitioners in all countries contribute to a vast professional literature, comprising textbooks, practical manuals, theoretical monographs, and a periodical literature whose bulk is becoming almost as big a problem as the enormous number of reported judicial decisions that are consulted for guidance and precedent. Fortunately, the development of sophisticated computerized legal-information services and the Internet have greatly facilitated access to this literature, though they arguably contribute to what has been described as an excess of data. Civil-law judges have traditionally paid close attention to the views of legal scholars as expressed in general and specialized treatises, commentaries on the codes, monographs, law review articles and case notes, and expert opinions rendered in connection with litigation, though some commentators have suggested that the role of jurists is diminishing as law practice and the academy change, especially on the European continent. Persistent scholarly criticism often prompts reexamination of a legal doctrine and sometimes even leads to the abandonment of an established judicial position. In the Anglo-American systems, legal writing has certainly become influential, as indicated by the increase in citations to secondary sources in contemporary judicial opinions. Nonetheless, the degree of deference to academic opinion is in general appreciably less than in the Continental countries.