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The inclination of modern jurists to associate lawyers with doctors: Plato's response inGorgias 464–465

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In particular, those who are academically trained are liable to institute a misleading analogy between physicians and lawyers.

—Alfred Z. Reed

Training for the Public Profession of Law (1921)

Abstract

From the turn of the century, jurists have tended to associate lawyers with doctors as professionals and tried to ground this association in an analogy between law and medicine. Paradoxically, such comparisons suggest that American law and medicine are not analogous, while an analogy proposed by Plato illumines more fundamental respects in which law and medicine might be truly analogous.

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  1. the Graduate School of Education, University of Rochester, 14267, Rochester, New York

    Bruce Kimball Ed.D.

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Kimball, B. The inclination of modern jurists to associate lawyers with doctors: Plato's response inGorgias 464–465. J Med Hum 9, 17–31 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01115240

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