The Law
The law perverted! And the police powers of the state perverted along with it! The law, I say, not only turned from its proper purpose but made to follow an entirely contrary purpose! The law become the weapon of every kind of greed! Instead of checking crime, the law itself guilty of the evils it is supposed to punish! If this is true, it is a serious fact, and moral duty requires me to call the attention of my fellow-citizens to it.
Frederic Bastiat (http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html)
Please read the essay linked below regarding the domination of politics and political processes by lawyers and by those who believe they are best qualified to determine what rights we might possess. Such abuse is obvious in not only our corrupt political institutions, but also in the very courts where justice is measured out in fees, fines and the time it takes for your lawyer’s retainer to run dry. Blind justice is supposed to weigh the scales carefully, but more and more “Lady Justice” is a material girl who holds out for her share of the take.
We’ve allowed the lawyers to craft the laws in manipulative ways that serve their own purposes, socio-politically as well as socio-economically, pricing their expertise beyond that of most mortal men. Because they grant only those in their circle the power to interpret the laws, the court system will always deliver a legalistic version of justice, contorting what we know to be true to fit their obtuse reasoning. With am increasingly legalistic court bureaucracy, citizens have no guarantee of access to a court to appeal for a redress of grievance from a government entity, much less any hope for redress of those grievances.
I believe lawyers have declared a monopoly on the meaning and intent of the words of our very laws, what “is” is per se, preventing citizens their right to redress of grievance without the presence of a lawyer in court. The lawyers are now our gatekeepers who must stand beside us to even access the pretense of justice in most cases.
If Justice for All in the United States of America requires a lawyer on retainer to even petition the court for redress, then there is Justice for None except as the lawyers determine.
While I am not sure the scientists would do much better than the lawyers, I think the linked article by Transhumanist Party Founder Zoltan Istvan offers some reasonable ideas we should think about since we very well be facing some very serious expansions of the rules of law.
“With almost 1.3 million lawyers—more by far than any other country, and more as a percentage of the national population than almost all others—the United States is choking on litigation, regulation, and disputation,” says Jeff Jacoby, a Boston Globe columnist with a law degree. “Everything is grist for the lawyers’ mills. Anyone can be sued for anything, no matter how absurd or egregious. And everyone knows how expensive and overwhelming a legal assault can be. The rule of law is essential to a free and orderly society, but too much law and lawyering makes democratic self-rule impossible, and common sense legally precarious.”
I hope others (including TBP’s lurking lawyers , perhaps even a nonpracticing lawyer, RG?) will have a discussion about how we proceed in a country where the officers of the law, both those in uniform and those serving on the as officers of the court, i.e., lawyers, can stand in the way of justice and never be held accountable for their actions.
Imagine for a moment if the US government was run by a cross-section of people by Zoltan Istvan Mar 20 2015
For many of us, our careers take more time and energy than anything else in our lives. Our chosen professions speak volumes not only about who we are, but what we believe in. With one’s job being so important in one’s life, you’d think there would be more insistence on career background diversity for the top leadership roles in the US government.
There isn’t.
Forty percent of our highest politicians in the US Congress are lawyers. And it’s been like that, or even more stilted, for a long time. Does that seem right?
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wnjk5m/less-lawyers
P.S. One of the issues which inspired this attempt to address the complete replacement of common sense common law with intentional legalese to prevent us from raising even a bullshit flag on what we know for a fact to be bullshit. Did anyone really expect that jury to find against a policeman in the same venue the policeman “served?”
Can any of us demand justice from any officers of the law and courts?
This Cop Is Getting $2,500 a Month Because Killing an Unarmed Man in a Hotel Hallway Gave Him PTSD
a good start would be no law degree required to practice law–ditto 4 being a judge–
Tampa, while I think there should be no law degree (or bar a$$ociation member$hip) required to petition or file documents in the court, i.e., one should be able to represent oneself in matters one understands and is confident to do so, I also agree one should not approach a court unprepared.
However, the statutes and laws are there for the reading, as cumbersome and legalistic as they are written. They can be deciphered and, in most cases, they tell you what to do. There are processes.
Lawyers know less and less about the laws and more and more about clever billing strategies. For instance, our attorney would stop by to “check” on other cases awaiting dates so he could bill those people for a few minutes of his precious costly time. Even our “honest” lawyer did that shit when he was with us in court. That is why we educated ourselves and figured out how to file our own paperwork. However, in Missouri, it ain’t so easy.
(When we corrected the fraudulent document filed by the fraud of a lawyer in Oklahoma, we hired a former judge. That way, the judge would see our judge and know we had money to pay for a top lawyer. Since we sued the fraudulent lawyer for our damages in small claims court ourselves -no lawyer will sue a lawyer for less than millions- we knew we would get it back. We did, but the son of a bitch made us show up in small claims court, THEN he met us in the hallway and paid us in secret.)
So, while I agree a law degree is not necessary, a person should meet certain requirements to represent themselves in a court of law: They need to know the law and how it applies to their situation.
And public schools have dumbed the population down so much I doubt many could do so.
Attorneys, judges and the like are true parasites. They go unregulated. Their black robes remind me of a murder of crows picking at the corpse of justice. If you get the idea I don’t care for this profession you are correct. Down vote me I will take it as a complement.
Good point TR. If Common Law Trial by Jury and Nullification by Jury should be re-asserted (not re-invented) we would be on the road to fulfilling your wish. In such a situation the jury decides and the judge is simply a convener. Check out http://www.democracydefined.org for more.
I hadn’t heard of Democracy Defined, Michael/
https://www.democracydefined.org/
I let my lawyer know yesterday (VERY PUBLICLY here in the Booty world) that because I had changed his diaper as a baby, I was qualified to spank his ass in public for taking my $2500 retainer and giving me NOTHING.
How about that ability to “redress grievances” NOW, assfucker, because Paula is right: You are a BORE.
Not you, Red. You are the best place to drop a load on someone overwhelmed by the HUBRIS virus.
I did get rather rude during this period, didn’t I?
It was hard to discover even “trusted” lawyers are experts only at billable hours.
I am a lot better off for accepting it and moving on.
The ‘law ‘ is an opinion. Therefore no one should be subject to its whims. We all know what real crimes are as they produce a victim. Today, many laws can’t identify a victim and yet people are punished for some bogus legal ‘opinion’.
Lawyers are frauds as they can’t prove anything. They rely on an absolute interpretation of opinions as their foundation. The entire lawyer ‘profession’ is just bullshit.
“Lawyers are frauds as they can’t prove anything. They rely on an absolute interpretation of opinions as their foundation.”
yeah man, we should all be our own law, that would be objective.
There are very good reasons for legal precedent being the foundation of legal reasoning. What is irrational is the affirmative action aspect the legal bureaucracy has decided to weave into legal opinions and judgments.
It is dangerous.
“we should all be our own law, that would be objective”
this gets no down-votes?
that is utterly awesome. you guys are gonna be SO much fun in the post-apocalypse.
We are supposed to be a nation founded on the rule of law; that no person is above the law and no person can be punished without a fair trial before a court of law.
Neither of those things are true in this country any more.
The entire lawyer profession could probably be done by a free app.
The problem with the law is there’s no end to it. The lawyers / judges / legislators make up new stuff all the time, usually involving something that is none of their business.
We have laws for made up crimes like money laundering, drug possession, needing permission to conduct business (licensing), etc.
The law is little more than fatwas passed down by a cabal that enforces their opinions at the point of a gun. The law is routinely used to steal more and more from the average person to enrich the state and its hangers on and to manipulate the society in formulating opinions in a given direction.
The law is deserving of absolutely no respect along with the creators and enforcers of this vicious racket.
Thats why the system will be wiped out in apocalyptic fashion but i fear what replaces it for the young minds to build the next system have been corrupted by the former…
Maggie – 25 years ago, I decided it would be a good experience to represent myself in my divorce case. My first appearance before the judge he asked me where my attorney was and I told him I was representing myself. He strongly suggested I get a real attorney, if I expected to proceed. He also told me that I needed to get a copy of the MS Rules of Court and had better follow them or he would punish me for every violation.
Being the hard headed person that I am, I went to the Ole Miss Law library and began to research. I asked a few of the students for some advice and a couple of them were more than willing to assist me. One of the court clerks was a young girl who was more than willing to help me with research on actual cases. She gave me a case # and told me to look at it because it had more motions than any other in her time in the clerk’s office. For three years I filed motions and would show up in court to argue them. He ALWAYS overruled my motions and in my last appearance he told me we were going to trial in 2 weeks and once again strongly suggested I get a real attorney.
I knew he was going to fleece me, so I started looking for an attorney to represent me. Little did I know that almost none of them would touch a case where the defendant had acted as his own attorney. I finally found a young lady who was willing to represent me. When I me with her the first time, I told her I had had a fool for an attorney and she asked “Which one?” As she reviewed my folder of documents, she asked why the judge denied one of my motions and my answer was “I am not an attorney”. She smiled and told me to give her $1,500 and she would take the case.
A month later, I was divorced and my ex-wife had run up quite a large legal bill. It was the least I could do for someone who tried to screw me over.
Wow. I’m glad it turned out. Been there.
It was a fun experience and helped me deal with the heartbreak and anger.
It was a lot of work, but it was fun proving that we could do it just as well as any stinking lawyer. And, they do stink. Even the “good” ones who can be kind of trusted.
We faced the same thing in Oklahoma, but we won and the last day, the judge complimented my husband on successfully handling the entire probate settlement process without any lawyer’s help. (It was across state lines and there was NO way were were hiring an Oklahoma lawyer and an Ohio thief too.) The judge even called my husband to the bench to congratulate him on the final court visit (It does require some court appearance time.)
LOL… he has a good research assistant.
In the late 1800’s a Congressman said to his fellow Congressmen, Gentleman, if we pass any more laws we will all be criminals.
Lawyers are just another Mafia shakedown squad.
What do you call 1 million lawyers at the bottom of the ocean….a good start.
“With almost 1.3 million lawyers—more by far than any other country, and more as a percentage of the national population than almost all others—the United States is choking on litigation, regulation, and disputation,” says Jeff Jacoby, a Boston Globe columnist with a law degree. “Everything is grist for the lawyers’ mills.”
just like the talmud.
When and if they reconstruct this nation, they need to re-frame lawyering to be like plumbing; you can always just go out in the woods and take care of things and nobody needs to know.
I really think most legal processes could be organized into checklists with the forms linked for each process. That is pretty much how lawyers do it except they have their legal assistants organize the forms for them to sign and turn in. They probably do not know how to use the programs that generate the documents.
I really do believe MOST lawyers could be replaced with a free phone app.
What we have is Corporate Law which is in place to protect THE USUAL SUSPECTS. Judges are lodge members and will make sure the cartels win. It is stacked in the favor of the elites/banking/ big business etc.
Exactly, Bea. Lawyers are members of the ultimate “knights templar” association.
And since the lawyers appoint themselves as the gatekeepers to justice, there is no justice, is there?
How does one take back justice?
jc is in the house
btw Man With No Dick?
You need to get a refresher in Bot Management.
Know what I just did?
I informed the lawyer whom I hired that he is FIRED.
I also sent a letter to the Misery Bar Association about his FAILURE as a lawyer, but you TEA BEA PEA thumbs up your asses types can’t read things in legalese.
are you a real person or did yoji make you up too
I could have been a lawyer instead of a Veterinarian, but my parents were married ?
doc,
if you had it to do over,would you still be a vet?
urban or rural?
the reason i ask is my daughter is starting to apply to vet schools,she has about a year left of undergraduate work–
Yes and no. If you stay in the country and can be in a multi Doctor practice so you get some time off, Yep. Solo in the country, nope. Urban you get time off but some/a lot of the clients are over the top. Financially for the $ and time put into it, nope. Pay doesn’t cut it. Look at something like bioengineering.
thanks
I prefer my veterinarian to every lawyer I ever met.
The manure in the gutters of an attorney is not cleanable. The waste contains to many virus’s.
I’m calling them by name…Lawyer = Liar and sometimes that is equal to Blogger.
FWIW? Paula is now in law school at OU, in Oklahoma. She got a VA disability scholarship.
I’m serious.
I got a hung jury on a serious felony after a 2 year trial.
The jury was marched in and out for 2.5 days of deadlocked deliberations until it was declared a mistrial.
I walked.
Hung juries are something like 1 in 5,000.
A serious felony? How serious Winnie?
A friend wants to know.
“In the Halls of Justice the only justice is in the halls.”
(Lenny Bruce)
“The function of the law is not to provide justice or to preserve freedom. The function of the law is to keep those who hold power, in power.”
(Gerry Spence)
“No one will give you justice; you have to take it”
(Alfred Ninny Bowager)
“Like a gun, a law degree can be used to oppress or liberate. It depends on who holds it”
(Alfred Ninny Bowager)
“The function of the law is not to provide justice or to preserve freedom. The function of the law is to keep those who hold power, in power.”
(Gerry Spence)
I had not seen that… how true.
I worked for a Fortune 500 company years ago at one of their manufacturing plants for 2 years. I learned over their past 30 years they had numerous fatalities at the site. The company president was associated with that plant his entire career. IMHO they were legally operating the plant, but not morally or ethically. I fully admit my morals and ethics are mine and no one else’s, but tolerating a fatality averaging one every five years with an obscenely high OSHA Recordable rate taught me the difference between legal and moral. They complied with all laws, yet tolerated way too many people getting injured.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I know humans react to incentives. If the incentives for lawyers don’t change, they won’t change.
crawfisher,
if they were legal & not being sued i’d say that the work comp laws in that state were weak–
Actually it was the opposite, very strong pro union worker comp laws. Injured people got lump sums and paid time off. For a small portion of employees, it was a weird incentive compensation racket.
They got injured, paid time off and financially rewarded. Upside down thinking.
When in college I worked a couple weeks one X-mas season at a waste paper recycling facility-I oiled and greased every bearing and shaft in the place. The corrugated cardboard line was a back-the-truck-up to the conveyor and unload process. The cardboard would go up an incline of about 12 feet and then down a chute into a man-made hell of a 5 foot diameter x 6 foot wide rotating hammer mill with curved prongs of ~2″ diameter x 6″ long steel that chewed the cardboard up. Cardboard chunks were then sucked along into a baling machine about 60 feet away and the bales then loaded onto a rail car. There was a sturdy set of stairs leading up to the top of the chute and a flimsy railing around the opening for “safety” purposes. Nearby was a 16 foot bamboo pole that would be used to unclog the chute in the case the conveyor man let too much cardboard into the chute. If the conveyor man let a clog form then he became the unclog guy who would have to run up the steps, grab the bamboo pool, and hope the clog did not get 10 times worse in the time it took him to react to his problem. If he fell in I seriously doubt the bailing guy would even notice, as it was so noisy and he could not even see the contents being fed into that machine. I never heard of an accident but never could reconcile how the plant manager allowed such an unsafe condition to exist (that was before OSHA became law).
Oh yeah, the shop mechanic (my boss) and I were the only two white guys on the floor.
I remember one time at Tinker AFB, a couple of workers fell into a big chemical bath (paint shop) and died. It was on the evening news.
There were people in line to apply for those jobs the next day.
Are you implying they discriminated against hiring whites?
crawfish?
You just described every military industrial complex operation I’ve seen. A couple in my years at Tinker AFB.
I saw the following poster on the wall of a major RR company Regional Manager. It was intended to be a joke, but correctly defined management’s attitude toward safety. the second line was in tiny script.
There is not a job so important that it cannot be done safely,
as long as the train is on time!
Did you see my comment about the job applicants the next day at Tinker after those guys died in that chemical vat at the depot paint shop?
We laughed about it, but OSHA declared it to be their fault for not following safety guidelines.
We all know that AIR QUOTES [[ SAFETY IS PARAMOUNT ]] AIR QUOTES
Be fast, but be safe first as quickly as you can.
And the legal staff has all your signatures on file saying you will follow all safety guidelines.
I did see it. Management has the CYA forms for themselves and anything you do is on your own a$$.
I filed a grievance on behalf of a man who was being reprimanded for not meeting deadline. He’d been in the hospital for a heart attack and management tried to say that was irrelevant.
It would have been funny if the asshole hadn’t pounded the table in front of me to emphasize “irrelevant” in a very spiteful way. Those are some really mean people who get put into positions of power.
Now, what really is funny is that the guy still works there and I got suspended for insubordination. LOL… I got a settlement from them a few months later after the NLRB fined them, but it taught all the union members a hard lesson. Stop having heart attacks.
Oh, yeah… corporate lawyer was sitting beside management. He blanched a bit at the fist pounding, but I’m pretty good at getting nasty reactions when I want to. It was fairly good theater since I turned in my resignation the second they had to bring me back and pay me backpay.
i had a guy working 4 me once that was a druggie who had been popped a bunch of x & had always had a public defender to represent him–
he always said that the job of the public defender was to keep the criminal docket moving–
Exactly… just a lawyer’s name to move the paperwork.
There has to be a better way.
Great article.
I don’t think any real Rule of Law as we know it, will ever return.
We are slipping at a good rate of speed toward a far more reality-based system; Law of the Jungle.
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I think it is time people start thinking about what the Rule of Law really means in a world where the Authority tells you what the Law means.
Thanks. Perfect song for the times.
This really is a quite appropriate song for these times, end days or not. It is a jungle.
Really, a lot of complaints by someone who doesn’t seem to understand the basis behind the problem.
The real problem is the adversarial nature of the US legal system. Lawyers on both sides can do anything they want in order to promote their case – there is no requirement to seek the truth.
In the UK, for example, a suspect who confesses a crime to his lawyer – the lawyer would be obligated to repeat that.
Yes, there are laws intended to try and prevent this – discovery and witness lists – but again, there are myriad ways to game the system, principally the impact of wealth. People with money can hire lots of lawyers to drive up costs for the poorer side.
“Moon’s office has handled most of the high profile civil and criminal cases relating to nationalists and Donald Trump supporters in Charlottesville. His rulings consistently suggest extreme political prejudice against defendants. His clerks in previous years may also be to blame.
According to a document uncovered by National Justice, the clerk helping author important opinions deciding the fate of accused “white nationalists” and “anti-Semites” for Moon during the 2018 term was Dascher Pasco, an Israeli citizen who is active in Jewish nationalist causes and has previously been employed by the Israeli government.”
Radical communists and jews pull the strings of 84 year old puppet judge: https://russia-insider.com/en/bombshell-staff-writing-legal-opinions-charlottesville-judge-hold-egregious-conflicts-interest
Some of these judges are appointed for ten year terms. We are stuck with SCOTUS for life. I’m thinking they will just hire a good taxidermist for RBG and call her delusional opinions eternally blind justice for us all.
sent it to dale graham, mags
I am glad I took a screenshot of RG’s reply to me here. It seems to be GONE.