Lawyers as Bureaucrats: The Impact of Legal Training in the Higher Civil Service

The influence of legal training and experience upon the behavior of policy decision makers has been a source of both academic and popular concern. This paper is a preliminary investigation of factors that might contribute to an undue influence of legal training on governmental policy making. The specific focus of this paper is higher-level federal executives in the career service. The distribution and number of high level executives with legal backgrounds are determined, and comparisons between legally-trained executives and executives from other backgrounds are made with respect to career patterns and attitudinal orientations. Executives with legal backgrounds are found to vary marginally on some specific characteristics, but there do not appear to be any systematic differences between groups which would lead to a variation in policy-making behavior. These findings do not support the assertion that lawyers dominate executive institutions of government. Lawyers do not appear to dominate the federal bureaucracy in numbers, nor do the data suggest that they are particularly different from other executives. Legal training, therefore, does not appear to have a direct, unmediated impact on the formation of public policy, at least to the extent that administrative agencies are involved in such policy making.