Robert Gordon has identified three alternative conceptions of the lawyers role that have enabled the Bar to preserve its autonomy from factions, classes, or racial groups: "The Whig-Federalist notion of the law as the embodiment of civic virtue, and the lawyer as the equivalent of the Tocquevillian aristocrat; (2) the nineteenth century Classical Liberal account of the law as a neutral mechanism creating spheres of autonomy and restrictions on power; and (3) the Progressive notion of law as a technical steering mechanism. As different as these versions of the idea of law as a public profession may be, they all contain the core notion that law is a neutral force in a divided society, and lawyers the servants of the general good, rather than agents of faction." [See: Robert W. Gordon, "Legal Thought and Legal Practice in the Age of American Enterprise 1870-1920," in Professions and Professional Ideologies in America, ed. G. Geison (1983), 70]

Following Gordon, David Trubek notes that "[e]ach account of professional autonomy centers on a different version of the notion of lawyers' neutrality. The Whig-Federalist lawyer was credited with the neutrality of a statesman, for the "gentleman-lawyer" was especially capable of prescribing the contours of the law for the good of the republic. The Classical Liberal lawyer’s neutrality derived from the disinterestedness with which the lawyer dispatched the mediating role; the lawyer simply clarified the boundaries between the individual and the state, whether in practice or rational law reform. Neutrality was also the hallmark of the Progressive lawyer, whose technical expertise in the neutral domain of policy science qualified the lawyer in the name of efficiency." [David M. Trubek, "Back to the Future: The Short, Happy Life of the Law And Society Movement," 18 Fla. St. U.L. Rev. 4, 13 (1990)]