It's hard to imagine a book titled Lawyers Gone Bad: Money, Sex and Madness in Canada's Legal Profession(Penguin)is going to be popular with your colleagues. Why did you write it?
I know lawyers are going to say, "Come on, he's talking about 15 or 20 members of a profession that has 90,000." But in telling these stories I'm trying to extract general ideas: the amoral nature of legal practice, the gross deficiencies of the regulation of lawyers, the sense of misery that pervades the legal profession.

Do you think most of the lawyers you write about started off bad, or did the practice of law change them?
Why do people end up doing things they shouldn't do? Their upbringing, their background? The point is, I don't think there's anything in the legal profession now that restrains people's bad impulses, I don't think there's a generally accepted code of conduct or a vibrant disciplinary system.

This isn't just a Canadian problem, either. On my desk I have an editorial from a South African magazine which begins, "Let's face it, our legal system has effectively collapsed ...  One of the more obvious reasons is the culture of greed, pride and self-indulgent arrogance that pervades the legal profession." Then there's this gem from the South China Morning Post about a client who asked for a breakdown of his legal bill, which included a charge for "recognizing you in the street, crossing a busy road to talk to you to discuss your affairs, and recrossing the road after discovering it was not you."

As you point out, in 2004 only 44 per cent of Canadians said they trusted lawyers, whereas two years earlier, 54 per cent said they did. Why do people dislike lawyers so much?
Lawyers are seen as greedy, and in good measure I think that's a justifiable criticism, and also unprincipled. Thirdly, and this is perhaps the most important point of all, the average person has no real access to lawyers, to the legal system, to justice. It's all right if you're very poor and have the kind of problem that legal aid will help with, but most Canadians have middle-class incomes and simply can't afford to hire a lawyer. The chief justice has spoken out about this, but very little is being done to rectify it. It's fundamentally undemocratic. It's as if somebody tried to pass a law that said you can't vote in a federal election unless you have an income of $100,000 or more. Well, there would be a revolution.

How has the legal profession changed in Canada over the past few decades?
In very general terms, it has become a business: interested in profit, not interested in making judgments, not interested in providing access to poor people or even middle-income people. The old ideas -- that lawyers have something to do with justice and fairness, and are part of an important system that provides a stable, safe, law-abiding society -- have, to the extent that you can generalize, been lost by members of the legal profession.

You taught law for 13 years, both at McGill and the University of Western Ontario, where you were the dean of law. Is there something about legal training that nudges lawyers toward amorality?
Yes, I think so. Law students are taught and lawyers subsequently believe that it is not their job to pass judgment on their clients as people, or to pass judgment on what their clients want to do. Lawyers are enablers. They are there to try to do what their client wants, and are in many cases paid handsomely for it. The whole question of the values behind the rules of the legal system is not on the whole of great interest to law schools or the legal profession. And there's an additional point: lawyers are taught to manipulate the rules in favour of their clients. If you're a manipulator of rules, then you can't respect the rules as such or believe that they incorporate important values.

How does that bleed over into their private lives?
I'm not sure of the answer to that, except to say that I think it does. There are studies about the marital success of lawyers, indicating that there's a higher divorce rate among members of the legal profession, and that may be true. The reason, I think, is that when you come home from the office, you don't become a different person. You don't shed all the ways of doing things and thinking about things that preoccupied you during the day. [I can imagine] a wife making small talk and a husband cross-examining her as though she's on the witness stand: "What evidence do you have to support the fact that there's something wrong with the furnace?"

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