András Jakab (Pazmany Peter Catholic University) has posted What Makes a Good Lawyer? Was Magnaud Indeed Such a Good Judge? on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
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The author analyses the style of thinking of a “good” lawyer, meaning by “good” desirable professional skills and not moral goodness. He argues that a good lawyer is narrow minded in the sense that he or she uses only legal arguments and translates all other types of arguments (e.g. moral or economic ones) into legal ones. Another feature is a pragmatic procedural approach concentrating on enforcement, rather than merely on the substantive legal issues. And finally, the most important characteristic of a good lawyer is two-tier thinking. This means that he or she has to comply both with an internal (typically lawyerly) criterion of argumentation and an external criterion of assessment.
