international mens organisation
09-16-2004, 08:39 AM
Quotations from Fred Rodell, Yale Law Professor, on The Law and
Lawyers
In TRIBAL TIMES, there were the medicine-men. In the Middle Ages,
there were the priests. Today there are the lawyers. For every age, a
group of bright boys, learned in their trade and jealous of their
learning, who blend technical competence with plain and fancy
hocus-pocus to make themselves masters of their fellow men. For every
age, a pseudo-intellectual autocracy, guarding the tricks of its trade
from the uninitiated, and running, after its own pattern, the
civilization of its day.
It is the lawyers who run our civilization for us - our governments,
our business, our private lives. Most legislators are lawyers; they
make our laws. Most presidents, governors, commissioners, along with
their advisers and brain-trusters are lawyers; they administer our
laws. All the judges are lawyers; they interpret and enforce our laws.
There is no separation of powers where the lawyers are concerned.
There is only a concentration of all government power - in the
lawyers. As the schoolboy put it, ours is "a government of lawyers,
not of men."
It is not the businessmen, no matter how big, who run our economic
world. Again it is the lawyers, the lawyers who "advise" and direct
every time a company is formed, every time a bond or a share of stock
is issued, almost every time material is to be bought or goods to be
sold, every time a deal is made. The whole elaborate structure of
industry and finance is a lawyer-made house. We all live in it, but
the lawyers run it.
And in our private lives, we cannot buy a home or rent an apartment,
we cannot get married or try to get divorced, we cannot die and leave
our property to our children without calling on the lawyers to guide
us. To guide us, incidentally, through a maze of confusing gestures
and formalities that lawyers have created.
The legal trade, in short, is nothing but a high-class racket. It is a
racket far more lucrative and more powerful and hence more dangerous
than any of those minor and much-publicized rackets, such as
ambulance-chasing or the regular defense of known criminals, which
make up only a tiny part of the law business and against which the
respectable members of the bar are always making speeches and taking
action.
The legal racket knows no political or social limitations.
Furthermore, the lawyers - or at least 99 per cent of them - are not
even aware that they are indulging in a racket, and would be shocked
at the very mention of the idea. Once bitten by the legal bug, they
lose all sense of perspective about what they are doing and how they
are doing it. Like the medicine men of tribal times and the priests of
the Middle Ages they actually believe in their own nonsense. This
fact, of course, makes their racket all the more insidious.
Consecrated fanatics are always more dangerous than conscious
villains. And lawyers are fanatics indeed about the sacredness of the
word-magic they call The Law.
Yet the saddest and most insidious fact about the legal racket is that
the general public doesn't realize it's a racket either. Scared,
befuddled, impressed and ignorant, they take what is fed them, or
rather what is sold them. Only once an age do the non-lawyers get, not
wise, but disgusted, and rebel. As Harold Laski is fond of putting it,
in every revolution the lawyers lead the way to the guillotine or the
firing squad.
It should not, however, require a revolution to rid society of
lawyer-control. Nor is riddance by revolution ever likely to be a
permanent solution. The American colonists had scarcely freed
themselves from the nuisances of The Law by practically ostracizing
the pre-Revolutionary lawyers out of their communities - a fact which
is little appreciated - when a new and home-made crop of lawyers
sprang up to take over the affairs of the baby nation. That crop, 150
years later, is still growing in numbers and in power.
What is really needed to put the lawyers in their places and out of
the seats of the mighty is no more than a slashing of the veil of
dignified mystery that now surrounds and protects The Law. If people
could be made to realize how much of the vaunted majesty of The Law is
a hoax and how many of the mighty processes of The Law are merely
logical legerdemain, they would not long let the lawyers lead them
around by the nose. And people have recently begun, bit by bit, to
catch on. The great illusion of The Law has been leaking a little at
the edges.
Yet it will take a great deal more than a collection of happenings
like these to break down, effectively, the superstition of the
grandeur of The Law and the hold which that superstition has on the
minds of most men. It will take some understanding of the wordy
emptiness and irrelevance of the legal process itself. It will take
some cold realization that the inconsistencies and absurdities of The
Law that occasionally come into the open are not just accidents but
commonplaces. It will take some awakening to the fact that training in
The Law does not make lawyers wiser than other men, but only smarter.
Perhaps an examination of the lawyers and their Law, set down in
ordinary English, might help achieve these ends. For, despite what the
lawyers say, it is possible to talk about legal principles and legal
reasoning in everyday non-legal language. The point is that, so
discussed, the principles and the reasoning and the whole solemn
business of The Law come to look downright silly. And perhaps if the
ordinary man could see in black and white how silly and irrelevant and
unnecessary it all is, he might be persuaded, in a peaceful way, to
take the control of his civilization out of the hands of those modern
purveyors of streamlined voodoo and chromium-plated theology, the
lawyers.
====================
via
International Mens Organisation
http://internationalmensorganisation.cjb.net
Fathers Fighting Injustice
http://fathersfightinginjustice.cjb.net
to join email ffiint-subscribe@topica.com
Lawyers
In TRIBAL TIMES, there were the medicine-men. In the Middle Ages,
there were the priests. Today there are the lawyers. For every age, a
group of bright boys, learned in their trade and jealous of their
learning, who blend technical competence with plain and fancy
hocus-pocus to make themselves masters of their fellow men. For every
age, a pseudo-intellectual autocracy, guarding the tricks of its trade
from the uninitiated, and running, after its own pattern, the
civilization of its day.
It is the lawyers who run our civilization for us - our governments,
our business, our private lives. Most legislators are lawyers; they
make our laws. Most presidents, governors, commissioners, along with
their advisers and brain-trusters are lawyers; they administer our
laws. All the judges are lawyers; they interpret and enforce our laws.
There is no separation of powers where the lawyers are concerned.
There is only a concentration of all government power - in the
lawyers. As the schoolboy put it, ours is "a government of lawyers,
not of men."
It is not the businessmen, no matter how big, who run our economic
world. Again it is the lawyers, the lawyers who "advise" and direct
every time a company is formed, every time a bond or a share of stock
is issued, almost every time material is to be bought or goods to be
sold, every time a deal is made. The whole elaborate structure of
industry and finance is a lawyer-made house. We all live in it, but
the lawyers run it.
And in our private lives, we cannot buy a home or rent an apartment,
we cannot get married or try to get divorced, we cannot die and leave
our property to our children without calling on the lawyers to guide
us. To guide us, incidentally, through a maze of confusing gestures
and formalities that lawyers have created.
The legal trade, in short, is nothing but a high-class racket. It is a
racket far more lucrative and more powerful and hence more dangerous
than any of those minor and much-publicized rackets, such as
ambulance-chasing or the regular defense of known criminals, which
make up only a tiny part of the law business and against which the
respectable members of the bar are always making speeches and taking
action.
The legal racket knows no political or social limitations.
Furthermore, the lawyers - or at least 99 per cent of them - are not
even aware that they are indulging in a racket, and would be shocked
at the very mention of the idea. Once bitten by the legal bug, they
lose all sense of perspective about what they are doing and how they
are doing it. Like the medicine men of tribal times and the priests of
the Middle Ages they actually believe in their own nonsense. This
fact, of course, makes their racket all the more insidious.
Consecrated fanatics are always more dangerous than conscious
villains. And lawyers are fanatics indeed about the sacredness of the
word-magic they call The Law.
Yet the saddest and most insidious fact about the legal racket is that
the general public doesn't realize it's a racket either. Scared,
befuddled, impressed and ignorant, they take what is fed them, or
rather what is sold them. Only once an age do the non-lawyers get, not
wise, but disgusted, and rebel. As Harold Laski is fond of putting it,
in every revolution the lawyers lead the way to the guillotine or the
firing squad.
It should not, however, require a revolution to rid society of
lawyer-control. Nor is riddance by revolution ever likely to be a
permanent solution. The American colonists had scarcely freed
themselves from the nuisances of The Law by practically ostracizing
the pre-Revolutionary lawyers out of their communities - a fact which
is little appreciated - when a new and home-made crop of lawyers
sprang up to take over the affairs of the baby nation. That crop, 150
years later, is still growing in numbers and in power.
What is really needed to put the lawyers in their places and out of
the seats of the mighty is no more than a slashing of the veil of
dignified mystery that now surrounds and protects The Law. If people
could be made to realize how much of the vaunted majesty of The Law is
a hoax and how many of the mighty processes of The Law are merely
logical legerdemain, they would not long let the lawyers lead them
around by the nose. And people have recently begun, bit by bit, to
catch on. The great illusion of The Law has been leaking a little at
the edges.
Yet it will take a great deal more than a collection of happenings
like these to break down, effectively, the superstition of the
grandeur of The Law and the hold which that superstition has on the
minds of most men. It will take some understanding of the wordy
emptiness and irrelevance of the legal process itself. It will take
some cold realization that the inconsistencies and absurdities of The
Law that occasionally come into the open are not just accidents but
commonplaces. It will take some awakening to the fact that training in
The Law does not make lawyers wiser than other men, but only smarter.
Perhaps an examination of the lawyers and their Law, set down in
ordinary English, might help achieve these ends. For, despite what the
lawyers say, it is possible to talk about legal principles and legal
reasoning in everyday non-legal language. The point is that, so
discussed, the principles and the reasoning and the whole solemn
business of The Law come to look downright silly. And perhaps if the
ordinary man could see in black and white how silly and irrelevant and
unnecessary it all is, he might be persuaded, in a peaceful way, to
take the control of his civilization out of the hands of those modern
purveyors of streamlined voodoo and chromium-plated theology, the
lawyers.
====================
via
International Mens Organisation
http://internationalmensorganisation.cjb.net
Fathers Fighting Injustice
http://fathersfightinginjustice.cjb.net
to join email ffiint-subscribe@topica.com
