What I mean is that the bar was set up for the lawyers themselves at that time. They didn’t create a 250 year plan for a Philadelphia bar that has played out in all that time and gotten us to today. It’s stayed in existence because it happened to stay useful for the lawyers that followed after them. Law itself is a collection of decisions made by judges and juries in trials, not decisions that are calibrated to have an impact over hundreds of years. Institutions are more like organisms that evolve, trying to adapt to the environment they find themselves in. The ones that work are able to stick around, and the ones that don’t die off.
You don't see an institution that established useful norms persisting for lifetimes as one worth preserving and emulating?
I do.
Medieval guilds are another equivalent but they could not deal with the industrial revolution or colonialism, so they don't seem like something worth studying (outside of their failures) if it can't deal with societal change.
You’re missing what I’m saying. I’m not commenting at all on their usefulness. I’m saying that the motivating factors that build and grow institutions are short term. Institutions last because people happen to find them useful over successive short time horizons, or they’re able to change them to suit the needs of the time. There’s no super long term planning in it, some happened to have the right combination of elements and some didn’t.
