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The prevalence of lawyers in American life is unusual. But their dominance at the top of American politics is startling. "Though they make up less than 1 percent of the population, lawyers currently constitute more than one-third of the House of Representatives and more than half the Senate. Fully half of the last ten presidents were lawyers, as are more than a third of the officials now serving in the states as governor, lieutenant governor, and secretary of state," Bagley writes. In the Democratic Party, every presidential and vice presidential nominee from Walter Mondale to Kamala Harris attended law school (Tim Walz, in this respect, was an almost radical break with tradition). When you make legal training the default training for a political career, you make legal thinking the default thinking in politics. And legal thinking centers around statutory language and commitment to process, not results and outcomes.
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