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Generally, a nonmember caught practicing law may be liable for the crime of unauthorized practice of law.[89] mon law countries with divided legal professions, barristers traditionally belong to the bar council or an Inn of Court and solicitors belong to the law society. In the English-speaking world, the largest mandatory professional association of lawyers is the State Bar of California, with 200,000 members.

Some countries admit and regulate lawyers at the national level, so that a lawyer, once licensed, can argue cases in any court in the land. This mon in small countries like New Zealand, Japan, and Belgium.[90] Others, especially those with federal governments, tend to regulate lawyers at the state or provincial level; this is the case in the United States,[91] Canada,[92] Germany,[93] Australia,[94] and Switzerland,[95] to name a few.

Brazil is the most well-known federal government that regulates lawyers at the national level.[96] Some countries, like Italy, regulate lawyers at the regional level,[97] and a few, like Belgium, even regulate them at the local level that is, they are licensed and regulated by the local equivalent of bar associations but can advocate in courts nationwide.[98] Such geographic limitations can be troublesome for a lawyer who discovers that his clients cause requires him to litigate in a court beyond the normal geographic scope of his license. Although most courts have special pro hac vice rules for such occasions, the lawyer will still have to deal with a different set of professional responsibility rules, as well as the possibility of other differences in substantive and procedural law.

Some countries grant licenses to non-resident lawyers, who may then appear regularly on behalf of foreign clients. Others require all lawyers to live in the jurisdiction or to even hold national citizenship as a prerequisite for receiving a license to practice; for example, the Supreme Court of Canada has upheld the constitutionality of a citizenship requirement.[99] In contrast, American citizenship and residency requirements were struck down as unconstitutional by the U.S.

Supreme Court in 1973 and 1985, respectively.[100] A key difference among countries is whether lawyers should be regulated solely by an independent judiciary and its subordinate institutions a self-regulating legal profession, or whether lawyers should be subject to supervision by the Ministry of Justice in the executive branch. In most civil law countries, the government has traditionally exercised tight control over the legal profession in order to ensure a steady supply of loyal judges and bureaucrats.

That is, lawyers were expected first and foremost to serve the state, and the availability of counsel for private litigants was an afterthought.[101] Even in civil law countries like Norway which have partially self-regulating professions, the Ministry of Justice is the sole issuer of licenses, and makes its own independent re-evaluation of a lawyers fitness to practice after a lawyer has been expelled from the Advocates Association.[102] Brazil is an unusual exception in that its national Order of Advocates has e a fully self-regulating institution with direct control over licensing and has successfully resisted government attempts to place it under the control of the Ministry of Labor.[103] In mon law lawyers have traditionally regulated themselves through institutions where the influence of non-lawyers, if any, was weak and indirect despite nominal state control.[104] Such institutions have been traditionally dominated by private practitioners who opposed strong state control of the profession on the grounds that it would endanger the ability of lawyers to zealously petently advocate their clients causes in the adversarial system of justice.[105] However, the concept of the self-regulating profession has been heavily criticized as a sham which serves to legitimate the professional monopoly while protecting the profession from public scrutiny.[106] In many countries, disciplinary mechanisms have been astonishingly ineffective, and penalties have been light or nonexistent in the vast majority of cases.[107] Lawyers are always free to form voluntary associations of their own, apart from any licensing or mandatory membership that may be required by the laws of their jurisdiction. Like their mandatory counterparts, such organizations may exist at all geographic levels.[108][109] In American English, such associations are known as voluntary bar associations.[110] The largest voluntary professional association of lawyers in the English-speaking world is the American Bar Association.

In some countries, like France and Italy, lawyers have also formed trade unions.[111] Hostility towards the legal profession is a widespread phenomenon. The legal profession was abolished in Prussia in 1780 and in France in 1789, though both countries eventually realized that their judicial systems could not function efficiently without plaints about too many lawyers mon in both England and the United States in the 1840s[113][114] Germany in the 1910s,[115] and in Australia,[116] Canada,[117] the United States,[118][119] and Scotland[120] in the 1980s.

Public distrust of lawyers reached record heights in the United States after the Watergate scandal.[121][119] In the aftermath of Watergate, legal self-help books became popular among those who wished to solve their legal problems without having to deal with lawyers.[122] Lawyer jokes already a perennial favorite also soared in popularity in English-speaking North America as a result of Watergate.[123] In 1989, American legal self-help publisher Nolo Press published a pilation of negative anecdotes about lawyers from throughout human history.[124] It is very difficult to determine when the legal profession started, because of all the confusion as described above about who is a lawyer. If one tightly defines a lawyer as a person who earns their living through advocacy in a court of law on behalf of others, then the earliest lawyers were probably the orators of ancient Athens see History of Athens.

However, Athenian orators faced serious structural obstacles. First, there was a rule that individuals were supposed to plead their own cases, which was soon bypassed by the increasing tendency of individuals to ask a friend for assistance.[125] Fortunately, around the middle of the fourth century BCE, the Athenians disposed of the perfunctory request for a friend.[126] Second, a more serious obstacle, which the Athenian orators pletely overcame, was the rule that no one could take a fee to plead the cause of another.

This law was widely disregarded in practice, but was never abolished, which meant that orators could never present themselves as legal professionals or experts.[127] They had to uphold the legal fiction that they were merely an ordinary citizen generously helping out a friend for free, and thus they could never organize into a real profession — with professional associations and titles and all the other pomp and circumstance — like their modern counterparts.[128] Therefore, if one narrows the definition to those men who could practice the legal profession openly and legally, then the first lawyers would have to be the orators of ancient Rome. A law enacted in 204 BCE barred Roman advocates from taking fees, but the law was widely ignored.[129] The ban on fees was abolished by Emperor Claudius, who legalized advocacy as a profession and allowed the Roman advocates to e the first lawyers who could practice openly — but he also imposed a fee ceiling of 10,000 sesterces.[130] This was apparently not much money; the Satires of plain that there was no money in working as an advocate.[131] Like their Greek contemporaries, early Roman advocates were trained in rhetoric, not law, and the judges before whom they argued were also not law-trained.[132] But very early on, unlike Athens, Rome developed a class of specialists who were learned in the law, known as jurisconsults iuris consulti.[133] Jurisconsults were wealthy amateurs who dabbled in law as an intellectual hobby; they did not make their primary living from it.[134] They gave legal opinions responsa on legal issues to ers a practice known as publice respondere.[135] Roman judges and governors would routinely consult with an advisory panel of jurisconsults before rendering a decision, and advocates and ordinary people also went to jurisconsults for legal opinions.[136] Thus, the Romans were the first to have a class of people who spent their days thinking about legal problems, and this is why their law became so precise, detailed, and technical.[137] During the Roman Republic and the early Roman Empire, jurisconsults and advocates were unregulated, since the former were amateurs and the latter were technically illegal.[138] Any citizen could call himself an advocate or a legal expert, though whether people believed him would depend upon his personal reputation.

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