Too Many Lawyers, Too Little Wisdom
 

 

By Doug Patton
June 24, 2008

"When there are too many policemen, there can be no liberty.
When there are too many soldiers, there can be no peace.
When there are too many lawyers, there can be no justice."

- Lin Yutang (1895-1976) Chinese-American writer and editor In Henry VI, Shakespeare wrote, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." Anyone with "esquire" behind his or her name will rightly tell you that the bard's quote, when taken in context, is in praise of lawyers. Personally, I prefer it taken out of context, as do most who quote it. Like all lawyer jokes, it makes the point that no one likes them and that there are far too many of them.

Paradoxically, it is the law that separates us from the uncivilized; yet lawyers in excessive numbers create a barrier to progress that threatens the very civilization we enjoy. This is especially true when wisdom is divorced from the practice of the law, as is so often the case in America today.

Take, for instance, the ridiculous ruling of the California Supreme Court, which mandated that the people of that state must accept a redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples. Or the recent United States Supreme Court decision that invented a constitutional right to habeas corpus and all the rights associated with citizenship for hostile combatants taken prisoner on foreign battlefields. Our ancestors would think us mad, indeed.

Thousands of years ago, King Solomon is reported to have been the wisest man in the world. When asked to judge between two women who claimed to be the mother of an infant, Solomon ordered that the child be cut in two and each woman be given half. One of the women immediately cried out that the king should give the baby to the other woman, which proved to Solomon that this woman was the child's mother, for she was willing to give her child to someone else rather than see it slain. Solomon's wisdom is not often in evidence in the legal profession today.

Recently, an Associated Press article was published concerning the number of American lawyers and law schools. It seems that the United States now has the dubious distinction of having 200 accredited law schools. Currently in this country we have one million lawyers, most of them hungry and anxious to sue someone. Anyone. Contrast that with Japan, a nation with approximately half our population, which has 18,000 practicing lawyers. We have nearly ten times that many people in law school at this very moment!

"I think we have this fundamental disconnect between images of lawyers in the popular media, in the courtroom dispensing justice, where everyone seems prosperous and well paid," says William Henderson, an Indiana University-Bloomington law professor who studies the job market. "The reality is for a lot of people, law school is a route to trying to start your own private practice, and that's a very crowded business right now."

So we have one million lawyers, their ranks swollen annually by fifteen percent from 200 law schools around the country. Many who cannot make it in private practice join the ranks of advocacy law. These are the legal parasites who impede society's advancement in the name of a cause such as global warming or homosexual special rights. They specialize in attacking traditional values and institutions and generally wreaking havoc on society. They are the ACLU types and other radical fringe groups bent on destroying America. And many times, they become the judges who find themselves ascending the ladder to our federal courts - where they can do some real damage.

Ethical lawyers and wise judges are rare today, and they are not rewarded for their common sense. A judge who wants to see his career flourish will not rule in a manner that will invite scrutiny by a higher court. To have a decision overturned is not in the best interests of a jurist's long term career goals. Do you suppose King Solomon would have concerned himself with such things?

Doug Patton is a freelance columnist who has served as a political speechwriter and public policy advisor. His weekly columns are published in newspapers across the country and on selected Internet web sites, including Human Events Online, TheConservativeVoice.com and GOPUSA.com, where he is a senior writer and state editor. Readers may e-mail him at dougpatton@cox.net.
http://www.gopusa.com/commentary/dpatton/2008/dp_06241.shtml

  
Lawyers and national politics

The Democrat Party has become the Lawyers' Party. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are lawyers. Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama are lawyers. John Edwards, the other former Democrat candidate for president, is a lawyer, and so is his wife, Elizabeth. Every Democrat nominee since 1984 went to law school (although Gore did not graduate). Every Democrat vice presidential nominee since 1976, except for Lloyd Bentsen, went to law school. Look at the Democrat Party in Congress: the Majority Leader in each house is a lawyer.

The Republican Party is different. President Bush and Vice President Cheney were not lawyers, but businessmen. The leaders of the Republican Revolution were not lawyers. Newt Gingrich was a history professor; Tom Delay was an exterminator; and, Dick Armey was an economist. House Minority Leader Boehner was a plastic manufacturer, not a lawyer. The former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is a heart surgeon.

Who was the last Republican president who was a lawyer? Gerald Ford, who left office 31 years ago and who barely won the Republican nomination as a sitting president, running against Ronald Reagan in 1976. The Republican Party is made up of real people doing real work. The Democrat Party is made up of lawyers. Democrats mock and scorn men who create wealth, like Bush and Cheney, or who heal the sick, like Frist, or who immerse themselves in history, like Gingrich.

The Lawyers' Party sees these sorts of people, who provide goods and services that people want, as the enemies of America. And, so we have seen the procession of official enemies, in the eyes of the Lawyers' Party, grow.
Against whom do Hillary and Obama rail?  Pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, hospitals, manufacturers, fast food restaurant chains, large retail businesses, bankers, and anyone producing anything of value in our nation.

This is the natural consequence of viewing everything through the eyes of lawyers. Lawyers solve problems by successfully representing their clients, in this case the American people. Lawyers seek to have new laws passed, they seek to win lawsuits, they press appellate courts to overturn precedent, and lawyers always parse language to favor their side.

Confined to the narrow practice of law, that is fine. But it is an awful way to govern a great nation. When politicians as lawyers begin to view some Americans as clients and other Americans as opposing parties, then the role of the leg al system in our life becomes all-consuming. Some Americans become 'adverse parties' of our very government. We are not all litigants in some vast social class-action suit. We are citizens of a republic that promises us a great deal of freedom from laws, from courts, and from lawyers.

Today, we are drowning in laws; we are contorted by judicial decisions; we are driven to distraction by omnipresent lawyers in all parts of our once private lives. America has a place for laws and lawyers, but that place is modest and reasonable, not vast and unchecked. When the most important decision for our next president is
whom he will appoint to the Supreme Court, the role of lawyers and the law in America is too big. When lawyers use criminal prosecution as a continuation of politics by other means, as happened in the lynching of Scooter Libby and Tom Delay, then the power of lawyers in America is too great. When House Democrats sue America in order to hamstring our efforts to learn what our enemies are planning to do to us, then the role of litigation in America has become crushing.

We cannot expect the Lawyers' Party to provide real change, real reform, or real hope in America. Most Americans know that a republic in which every major government action must be blessed by nine unelected judges is not what Washington intended in 1789. Most Americans grasp that we cannot fight a war when ACLU lawsuits snap at the heels of our defenders. Most Americans intuit that more lawyers and judges will not restore declining moral values or spark the spirit of enterprise in our economy.

Perhaps Americans will understand that change cannot be brought to our nation by those lawyers who already largely dictate American society and business. Perhaps Americans will see that hope does not come from the mouths of lawyers but from personal dreams nourished by hard work. Perhaps Americans will embrace the truth that more lawyers with more power will only make our problems worse,….perhaps not.