Democracy in America

First, Tocqueville notes that the federal government’s authority remains limited, and federal policy is enforced partly by local leaders that no authority controls. Were this not the case, he is confident that “despotism” would be the result (250). Second, Tocqueville notes that lawyers exercise great authority and social position in American life. Lawyers, by temperament and training, form a kind of intellectual aristocracy that prefers social order to unrest. Lawyers may act as revolutionaries—they did in France in 1789—but this is a practical response to their inability to influence society’s development in aristocratic systems. Lawyers fill the power vacuum that democracy leaves when it decimates aristocratic structures: “they then form the only enlightened and skilled men whom the people can choose outside themselves” (253). Tocqueville argues that lawyers serve as intermediaries between aristocratic and democratic systems, partly because the Anglo-American legal system makes law unintelligible to the untrained. Because of the system’s reliance on precedent and tradition, a lawyer emerges as a “lone interpreter of an occult science” (255-56).

Tocqueville further argues that the ability to declare laws unconstitutional acts as an important restraint on democratic impulses. Additionally, lawyers are a uniquely trusted elite and frequently hold public office.