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Why was the right to a trained defense advocate in serious criminal cases not widely recognized until the 18th century?

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illustration from Charles Dickens's Bleak House — Legal ethics Illustration by Hablot Knight Browne for Charles Dickens's *Bleak House*. Here Lady Dedlock is visited by her cunning old lawyer, who discovers her deepest secret and threatens to reveal it to her husband.

The historical delay in recognizing the right to a trained defense advocate in serious criminal cases was primarily driven by deep-seated public distrust of litigious advocacy.1

For centuries, many societies viewed the role of an advocate with suspicion, fearing that lawyers were paid to manipulate the truth or use sophisticated, deceptive arguments to make a "worse cause appear the better". This sentiment was famously echoed by philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, who condemned the practice of using rhetorical tricks to establish as true what common sense suggested was false. Because of this intense hostility toward the perceived moral ambiguity of defending those accused of serious crimes, the right to representation by a trained advocate was not generally recognized until the 18th century.1

Over time, legal systems attempted to mitigate these concerns by framing the lawyer as an "officer of the court" with a primary duty to the truth and the law, rather than solely to the client. This ethical framework sought to balance the necessity of legal defense with the integrity of the justice system.12