I discovered the other day, while in my daily business of tracking down the wild and radical of lawyering in North America, that Jimmy Carter once unapologetically excoriated the legal profession for being full of itself. He did this in a speech to the Los Angeles County Bar Association. At its 100th anniversary celebration. When he was the President of the United States.

The speech was a pretty big deal. Carter had the American Bar Association print the entire speech verbatim over six pages in the middle of its glossy monthly magazine, the ABA Journal. The ABA published the speech along with a bitter and vigorous full-page response by the ABA’s president, plus the implicit response made by then-Chief Justice of the United States Warren Burger in remarks he gave a few days after Carter’s. The New York Times covered the speech at the top of its front page, printed excerpts from the speech on page A15, then covered it again a day later and again a week later after the ABA president issued his response.

The full text of the speech is online, and if you read it you’ll see that Carter (a nonlawyer) hammers the profession more or less nonstop. He does not let up. Here are the harshest blows:

“No resources of talent and training in our own society, even including the medical care, is more wastefully or unfairly distributed than legal skills.”

“The basic right to vote, to hold a job, to own a home, to be informed of one’s legal rights when arrested, to have legal counsel if an indigent—these rights have been denied for generations in our country and are being recently won only after intense struggle. I think about these things when I come to speak with you. What I think about most, however, is the enormous potential for good within an aroused legal profession and how often that potential has not been and is not used.”

“During too many of the struggles for equal justice, just in the lifetimes of you and me—the questions of one-man, one-vote, voting rights for blacks, representation for indigent clients, and others—much of the organized bar sat on the sidelines or actually opposed these efforts.”

“One of the greatest failings of the organized bar in the past century since the American Bar Association was founded is that it has fought innovations. When greater competition has come to the legal profession, when no-fault systems have been adopted, when lawyers have begun to advertise or compete—in short, when the profession has accommodated the interests of the public, it’s done so only when forced to.”

And finally, this call for lawyers to help end the squander of privilege:

Those of us—Presidents and lawyers—who enjoy privilege, power, and influence in our society can be called to harsh account for the ways we are using this power. Our hierarchy of privilege in this Nation, based not on birth but on social and economic status, tends to insulate some of us from the problems faced by the average American. The natural tendency for all of us is to ignore what does not touch us directly. The natural temptation when dealing with the law is to ensure that whatever is legal is just. But if our Nation is to thrive, if we are to fulfill the vision and promise of our Founding Fathers, if we are truly to serve the ends of justice, we must look beyond these comfortable insulations of privilege.

Hunter S. Thompson heard a version of this speech that Carter made as governor of Georgia in 1974 and wrote in Rolling Stone that it was “the heaviest and most eloquent thing I have ever heard from the mouth of a politician.” (Marc Galanter tracked that quote down and discusses the two Carter speeches in his fascinating high-minded joke book Lowering the Bar: Lawyer Jokes and Legal Culture.)

A day after Carter delivered the 1978 speech in Los Angeles, he traveled to Spokane, Washington, where he railed against the medical profession, saying that doctors “have been the major obstacle to progress in our country in having a better health care system . . . .”