Rules are a suggestion, not a requirement. Nobody knows what they're doing, because they don't have to. There is no reward for accurate and efficient work.
Courts are no longer effective remedies for the average individual. The requirement of lawyers to operate courts excludes justice from anyone but the wealthy. As costs of education and elitism rise lawyers are becoming increasingly harder to find.
Large government is by nature dysfunctional. Same as mega corps. The larger you get the more inefficiency you attract and the more you can push out competition. As this increases people want anti trust.
The people want anti trust applied to the federal government.
I don't see why the west should be ruled by any particular type of profession, just engineers or just lawyers seem equally bad to me.
Honestly I think a lot of political disaster that is in the US could be traced back the the abundance of lawyers.
Seen from the outside, America to me is a country which has made every aspect of society into some form of legal struggle or court case. That just doesn't seem like a healthy way to organize society.
The polarized aspects of a court room, is reflected in American politics and public life itself. Politics is gridlocked because it is all about winning at any price. It is the logic of a lawyer.
I think this has become so ingrained in American phsycology that most Americans can't even see it anymore.
Modern law has many failings but biases among judges favoring lawyers does not rank high on the list.
Here are some truly important things that favor the legal profession at the possible expense of others and these generally have nothing to do with judges:
1. Lawyers operate in the equivalent of a closed guild system that restricts the availability of legal services to the public and that causes fees to be artificially inflated. Lawyers need to be licensed in any given state in order to practice law and, even if licensed in one state, cannot practice in any other state unless licensed there as well. Lawyers also were historically subject to significant restrictions on being able to advertise and promote their services and many restrictions persist to this day. These licensing requirements and advertising restrictions are not established by judges but by legislators who take it upon themselves to define standards for the practice of law in the name of protecting clients.
2. Expansionist view of law as an instrument of social change have transformed the legal profession from a modest service business into a mega-industry over the past five or six decades. When I started practicing law in the late 1970s, I would marvel at how, e.g., all reported federal cases spanning a couple of hundred years took up x shelf space through 1960 while those for 1960 and on took 10x (and were growing exponentially). The San Francisco firm I started with had been formed in the 1880s and, even up to the early 1960s, had no more than 25 lawyers in it at any given time - today, it has over 1,000 lawyers. What has brought on such changes? Vast new federal statutes that defined whole new categories of liabilities, highly liberalized pleading and discovery rules that let pretty much any case get to trial at enormous expense to those being sued, radical new types of cases such as class actions that promoted mega-litigation - all these and more have brought about an exponential growth rate in the legal field, and none of these has to do with judicial bias favoring lawyers.
3. The "American rule" specifying that each party normally must bear his own attorneys' fees (as opposed to the "English rule" specifying that the loser pays the winning side's fees) enables litigants to freely file crap-shoot cases at little risk to themselves in hopes of extorting nuisance settlements or worse from those being sued.
4. Lawyer in-breeding creates mutual back-scratching. Big Law consists of mega-firms of all types, those that promote big litigation and those who defend against such litigation. Yet, all are united in promoting political and legislative changes that enable such litigation to continue to expand. Here is where the vested interests lie and, in this sense, judges can occasionally sympathize in being part of the club (in this sense the study conducted in this piece rings partially true).
Since law does not lend itself to skilled handling by those untrained in its technical aspects, it is unrealistic to expect that citizen judges will provide the answer to curbing the exponential growth in the legal profession and in the scale of fees charged. If reform is to be sought, the answers must mostly lie elsewhere.
Our legal systems have already become like this. Only those with the knowledge on how to navigate the system or those qualified to interface in the expected protocols have any hope of achieving results.
Super-corporations are now just the next rung down, adopting all the habits of their superior, but without the responsibilities.
During my (admittedly brief) research into this topic, I began to wonder if perhaps there isn't a self-reinforcing process at work. Lawyers make the laws (because lawyers make up more of the law-making bodies in the US than any other profession by a huge amount), determine who is qualified to both prosecute and defend, determine the restrictions on who can compete with them, and determine how complex the laws will be. The people making the laws thus have a vested interest in them being too complex for the layperson to understand.
I'm genuinely not anti-lawyer. But, I can't help but think the system we have has many unintended consequences, and contributes to a legal system in which only the very wealthy can participate in a meaningful way. This may explain why, for example, polluters always seem to end up in the neighborhoods of poor people. If they set up shop next to a billionaire, they'd be sued out of existence; poor folks simply don't have the funds to fight a big legal battle like that. I'm pretty sure the bar is not the biggest cause of any of this, but it does seem obvious to me that disallowing anyone other than members of the bar from participating directly in the legal process definitely manipulates the market.
Well, part of the problem with our current society is that the social norm is to only look out for your own interest, and the public be damned.
This attitude is applicable to lawyers, who only represent their clients, to company executives, who only represent investors, to investors, who only care about their own returns, and to lobbyists, who only care about their lobby's interests.
This sort of system is fine when all parties to a dispute are equally organized and powerful, but it squeezes out the general public, who are not able to mobilize as effectively. It also forces people to focus on how to win, rather than how to cooperate more effectively for mutual benefit.
Unless we are willing to relax this attitude of 'only care about my own or my client's bottom line' at least a little bit, there is going to be little room for changes that are necessary to happen.
I don't disagree. It is how the legal profession works, though. If clients demanded something more efficient then there would be incentive to change, but they almost never do.
Speaking in general terms, lawyers are a sign of a sick society. The law should be a set of agreed rules by which we all agree to abide in order to create a better society for everyone. If we need a specialised profession to explain to us what the rules we all implicitly agreed to abide by say we should do, or as is often the case not even explain to us but just tell us the outcome, the rules are no longer fit for purpose.
If I accept that technical difficulty and infeasibility is no defense, then I want that standard applied to lawyers as well.
Overly litigious firms causing rising legal costs across industries? I don't care if it's hard to solve, the onus for fixing it is on the firms, they figure it out or face penalties. Perhaps in the interests of helping the disenfranchised we could institute something like what real estate has, where banks are required to sell a quota of mortgages in certain areas regardless of the financial viability. Lawyers could be forced to seek out clients they would ordinarily never entertain due to the risk of loss. If would stink for them, but what do I care? That's their problem.
"I'm sure there are good lawyers out there, but they seem as rare as hen's teeth and well-intentioned social media companies. "
It seems the incentive for lawers as a group is, make everything more complicated for everyone else, so everyone else is more dependant on lawers to do anything at all.
It’s worse: the legal industry is efficiency-hostile because it relies heavily on reinventing the wheel on an hourly basis with the moat of a guild system to keep competition under control. And worse yet: most clients aren’t interested in anything less than the most expensive, white-glove service because they equate paying more to buying more peace of mind. In reality, most clients pay law firms gobs of money to read stuff that they can’t be bothered to read themselves. And law firms can’t even be held accountable for giving bad advice. It’s a pretty bleak landscape for problem-solvers.
Unfortunately I don’t have any good citations just IRL lawyer friends. Should be easy to google the rules though. IANAL but The rule is basically that law firms can only be owned by lawyers. The idea being (i think) that lawyers have a legal responsibility to their clients and that’s be corrupted via existence of shareholders (or, shareholders without legal responsibility too).
Regarding your theory, I think it’s bunk. There has been a consistent trend to centralized big companies throughout American capitalism long before the 80s. Just look at the history of GE. In fact, the growth of index funds actually indicates a shift away from big corps (or at least big corps with disparate business groups) because investors can pick and choose markets better without relying on conglomerates to do that for them.
But it should be obvious that massive urban centers are not due to US laws… because we have 1k+ years of cities before that with good documentation of life and laws in those cities.
No kidding... It seems to me, outside of a small handful, most lawyers outside of politics aren't going to be raking it in without becoming partners... Paralegals are also cheaper still than new lawyers and can do most of the work.
Not to mention my issues with the legal system becoming to convoluted for anyone... We start with a fairly simple guideline (constitution) and a common-law basis for a legal system beyond that, and it turns into the crap we have today... no bill going through congress should be thousands of pages.
I agree with eliminating the need for lawyers for most things, but the biggest problem about it is that in small cities/towns (maybe big ones too, I just have no experience in that domain) judges and lawyers are "buddies". People with the exact same charges can get radically different sentences depending on if they have a paid lawyer vs no lawyer or a public defender. There's a public defender in my town who also has his own private firm, and it's amazing how differently the judge and DA respond to whether or not you hired him or the town did. If all of that isn't bad enough, you can see the judge, DA , and lawyers all making backroom deals and exchanging favors. And they do it fairly blatantly in my town. I've rarely seen an objective case and it's a shame because law is perceived as a "sacred" domain where objectivity rules.
I find the need for lawyers a tragedy. Interactions with the judicial system are often some of the most important events in a person’s life. The fact that it’s necessary to pay someone hundreds or thousands of dollars an hour to help navigate the arcane process is sad and shouldn’t be necessary. It would be one thing if laws were meaningfully written down, so that anyone could read the statutes and build their own argument, but the laws are not written down in a way that has meaning unless you are willing to wade through centuries of case law.
The remedy here seems to be expecting lawyers to do their jobs. Citations would be nice but I don’t see a reason to legislate that requirement, especially from the bench. Let the market sort this one out. Discipline the lawyers using existing mechanisms.
The rule of law is a key part of the mix of institutions, geography, culture and luck that have made the USA the richest country that has ever been.
And with the rule of law comes lawyers. I know it's fashionable to hate lawyers, but they're a necessary profession.
Law is a field in which small details can have very large consequences once the full line of reasoning is unfolded. Because of the importance of exhaustively covering all lines of argument to the maximal possible depth, lawyers are required to do so.
They don't do it to bill you more. It is their legal duty.
If you don't like that lawyers are required on pain of loss of income, loss of profession and potentially loss of personal liberty to give you the fullest and most complete service that they are able to give you, then you are entitled to represent yourself.
Courts are no longer effective remedies for the average individual. The requirement of lawyers to operate courts excludes justice from anyone but the wealthy. As costs of education and elitism rise lawyers are becoming increasingly harder to find.
Large government is by nature dysfunctional. Same as mega corps. The larger you get the more inefficiency you attract and the more you can push out competition. As this increases people want anti trust.
The people want anti trust applied to the federal government.
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