March 25, 2025
Jarndyce v. Jarndyce: An Ethical Lesson from Charles Dickens
BY: Nathan Moelker 1
The great 19th-century novelist Charles Dickens issued a warning to the lawyers of his day, a warning that has much to stay to us today as well. In Bleak House he depicted the delays and abuses of the law, using a fictional case to demonstrate the many legal abuses he witnessed in the legal profession.2 Sadly, those abuses have only gotten worse, and his warning should be heeded again.
Bleak House depicts a fictional case where the “scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated, that . . . no two . . . lawyers can talk about it for five minutes, without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause: innumerable young people have married into it;” and, sadly, the original parties “have died out of it.” A “long procession of [judges] has come in and gone out” during that time, and still the suit “drags its weary length before the Court.”3 Over the course of the novel, it is revealed that a lawsuit over an estate dragged on for generations until the entire estate is consumed by legal costs. Lawyers continued to make plenty of fees, thriving and succeeding, where their clients were caught in the wheels of the Jarndyce case and watched it consume their lives. One character’s obsession leads to his financial ruin and early death, while another loses her sanity waiting for a judgment.
This is no mere fiction. Courts regularly compare the case before them to Jarndyce, utilizing it as dramatic evidence of how litigation can drain the money and time of the parties.4 In fact, in one case the U.S. Supreme Court suggested that Dickens may have underestimated things: “To describe this litigation as a 20th-century sequel to Bleak House is only a slight exaggeration. Dickens himself could scarcely have imagined that 56,000 hours of lawyering at a cost of $ 7,500,000 would represent the visible expenses of only one party to a modern intercorporate conflict, to say nothing of the time of corporate and management personnel diverted from their daily tasks.”5 That statement from the Supreme Court is from over fifty years ago, and the overwhelming costs and delays of litigation have only increased, such that this description may seem almost quaint to many of us.
The problem Dickens saw in Bleak House is a system is designed to perpetuate itself rather than resolve disputes. Lawyers deliberately prolong proceedings to maximize their profits, while creating an impenetrable bureaucracy of paperwork and obscure terminology that ordinary citizens cannot navigate. The inheritance dispute in that novel has persisted for so many generations that the original parties are long dead, and the case's purpose has become obscured by mountains of documentation. When the case finally concludes, it's not through resolution but exhaustion—the entire estate has been consumed by legal costs. Dickens uses this absurdist conclusion to demonstrate how the legal system has inverted its purpose, destroying the very property it was designed to protect.
Bleak House is a general indictment of lawyers. In Dickens’ novel, lawyers expand and protract the dispute making problems worse, rather than resolve it. As we can all understand, “It is striking how little these general indictments have changed from mid-nineteenth century England.”6
The answer to Bleak House should be a different vision of the legal profession, one where we are true to our duty to the truth and our clients. Bleak House warned that “[t]he one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself.”7 As young lawyers we should heed this warning. Almost two centuries after Dickens began criticizing the legal system, many of his observations remain remarkably pertinent. His warnings are also not unique to fiction; President Lincoln, while still a lawyer, warned young attorneys, “[n]ever stir up litigation. A worse man can scarcely be found than one who does this. Who can be more nearly a fiend than he who habitually overhauls the register of deeds in search of defects in titles, whereon to stir up strife, and put money in his pocket?”8
These warnings hold up a mirror to the legal profession, reflecting the dangers of failing to live up to our ideal. We should heed what the mirror shows us.
Endnotes:
1 Nathan Moelker is senior associate counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice, a nonprofit organization specializing in First Amendment law and religious freedom. He litigates cases related to these issues in courts all over the country, including at the U.S. Supreme Court. He clerked for Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Parker. Nathan is also the author of several law review articles, primarily focused on the First Amendment. All views expressed are his own.
2 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (Everman’s Library ed., 1977) (1853).
3 Id. at 4.
4 Hess v. Port Auth. Trans-Hudson Corp., 513 U.S. 30, 48 (2006).
5 Hughes Tool Co. v. TWA, 409 U.S. 363, 393 (1973).
6 Michael K. Mcchrystal, At the Foot of the Master: What Charles Dickens Got Right About What Lawyers Do Wrong, 78 Or. L. Rev. 393, 422 (1999).
7 Bleak House, supra note 2, at 503.
8Notes For A Law Lecture, 2 Collected Works Of Abraham Lincoln 81 (Roy P. Basler et al., eds., Rutgers University Press, 1953–1955).