There are quite a few people on this board who never pass up the opportunity to demonstrate their ignorance of the legal system. I won’t name names like Stan Shmenge because there are so many of you. Anyway, I’ve broken them down into a sort of taxonomy. To cut some posters off at the pass, I will freely admit that this is not an ironclad characterization, and that you might be some combination of the dumbs listed below.
1: The “lawyers and judges cause societal ills” morons. Yes, there are cases of frivolous lawsuits, and egregiously improper prosecutions. Yes, lawyers sometimes make a lot of money, maybe more than you. On the other hand, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE BAD LAWYERS is opposed by another lawyer, and there are plenty of lawyers working for the poor and making low pay. People that rant and carry on about how the justice system is horribly broken because of their own confirmation bias and their lack of understanding should get to do without it. I’m sure it would all be better if we just elected some person, usually the ranter, who would just make all decisions. They could make them all ad hoc as well, because it’s all just so simple and everything makes sense until the lawyers get involved. I’m sure we could do without precedent and consistent rules and firm procedural rules, because all of these things just make it harder than it is. Any person with a grade-school education should be able to make these determinations. AmIrite? As far as it goes, instead of having some sort of court system, maybe we should have a government official, who is, say, a plumber or an engineer, decide who is guilty and not, and we wouldn’t even have to pay them much. It’s not as if much is at stake, right? Oh, but look at all these liability issues we have to deal with – if it wasn’t for lawyers we could still have our Jarts. Well hey, guess what? Mommy doesn’t like it when Alpha Tau Douchebag is playing Jarts drunk and chucks one into her kid’s face, who then runs smack into a Pinto and explodes. I see where you are going… ATD is responsible for his actions. Course, without lawyers, he’ll be fine, because his daddy can just hire assassins to take Mommy out.
Realize this: For every case that you think is wrong, there is a lawyer that agrees with you. And hey, maybe sometimes YOU are the wrong one. I know it’s tough, but if you give it a long thought, perhaps it’s not right for you to get sued because you didn’t shovel your walk or left a bear trap in your front yard or let your precious widdle Mr. Snarly the rott loose and he bit someone.
In closing, let me say that yes, there are bad lawyers. And there are good lawyers. And there are middling lawyers. And hey, they all want to make money, because it’s a tough job (see moron number 2 if you disagree), it takes a lot of expensive training, and because they have to eat too. So fuck you if you think that someone makes more than they should for doing whatever it is they do. In my opinion, you’re probably dissatisfied with your own paycheck and have sour grapes, or you make more than you should as well – why the fuck aren’t you donating your time? Cause I know a lot of lawyers who work for fucking peanuts who are skilled, care for their community, and have spent themselves into a hole to get into a position to help people while you are sitting on your ass pulling down 50k typing shit into computers or moving crates or whatever.
2: The pro se morons. Yes, you can get a book and study the relevant law and cases and represent yourself. Unfortunately, you will 99.99% of the time focus on a minor detail that has nothing to do with your case, you will misinterpret issues, you will miss the glaring weaknesses in your case, and/or you will become angry and bitter because the system is working against you, the heroic bucker of trends who knows that you are being railroaded because it’s just so clear that you are right. You need to join up with moron number 4 below and take my class: “How the law doesn’t work, you blithering waste of oxygen”. The reason you suck as your own lawyer is because it’s too hard for people to make rational judgments when its their own ass on the line. The other reason is that you just don’t know what the fuck you are doing, just like if you dropped me into a job rebuilding engines by hand. One NON-reason is the conspiracy to keep you dependent upon lawyers so that we can leach all your money without providing a service. But hey, what do lawyers know, they took the long route, when all they had to do was crack open “How to Appeal Your Death Sentence for Dummies”.
3: The ultraspecific morons. You had a divorce. The ex got the kids. Some judge made you pay more than the statutory recommendation, ignoring the fact that the ex is now dating a doctor. You can’t claim the kids on taxes every year. I imagine it to start with a feeling that you have been wronged. But then it grows. Maybe Judge X should be recalled. Before long, the Judge takes bribes from the other side. Your lawyer is good (maybe) but he is fighting against “the machine”. Your dad rights are being trammeled by the Order of the Protectors of Motherhood. The other side’s lawyer is a rule-breaking bitch set on cutting your balls off for daring to have a Y chromosome. You have been wronged. But it’s not just Judge X! It’s a conspiracy! The whole system is out to get good honest hard working people like you! Maybe Moron number 1 is on to something…
4: The magic words morons. Now, a lot of people fall into this trap. I actually think they are not so much morons, but just out of their depth. They become actual morons when they fail to realize this fact. Everyone knows about tax protesters. Gold fringe on the flag, not giving your social security number, putting your lastname, firstname on documents… these all fail. But there are tons of people, many of who would make fun of tax protesters, that do the same thing. Nerds love fair use. More precisely, they love their idea of fair use, which bears little resemblance to the actual doctrine. Small business owner types try to skirt laws on technicalities that they came up with. People talking about criminal law look up the statute and there it is in black and white. All you have to do is X. An example is the movie “Double Jeopardy”. Everyone knows it’s a stupid premise, yet it’s just so hard to shake the idea that law is easy. In one sentence, here it is:
There are no magic words, and things are well-thought-out.
You see, the justice system is made up of people. Congress writes some things down occasionally, but most of the time they aren’t clear, because being perfectly clear is really really hard for any non-trivial matter. So we have lawyers who interpret the laws. We have a judge who decides which interpretation is better. These aren’t stupid people. If you put your last name comma first name in a document, they still know who you are. If you draw up all these little hypotheticals about when you can kill someone with a tasty poison snack, the court will discern that you aren’t the Dread Pirate Roberts and you were going to build up your resistance to poison, or that they weren’t actually for your kid’s school project. So the courts have a built-in bullshit detector. And given how often these mouthbreathers will post about this shit, one has to wonder if their bullshit detector apparatus might not be working at optimal efficiency.
Basically, every “sneaky law trick” has been tried, by people smarter than you. In the rare instances where it works, the law gets changed fast, or was just political posturing anyway and they don’t give a shit.
The other side to this coin is that the law has been around for a pretty decent chunk of time, and we’ve learned that there are some things we like, and some we don’t. For example, it is illegal to set traps for intruders. There are all kinds of reasons for this, which I won’t go into. But these considerations have been, well, considered, and over the years we’ve kind of figured shit out. Some things we got wrong (Sorry, Mr. Scott). Many we got right (Sorry, Mr. Abusive Cop). But just because, on a few minutes thought, your sense of justice is offended doesn’t mean that the law is stupid. It’s just that maybe you haven’t given it enough thought. Either way, it’s pretty rare that the law is going to be completely inane and off base. The conflicts in the law show up where reasonable people can disagree. And they do. But that doesn’t make it stupid. Move on.
So to all of you morons, please stop and ask yourself where, without lawyers, we would get things like the Constitution or Miranda rights, or the ability to know what is legal and illegal before you get sued, or contracts that are upheld, or even the right to speak up against your own taxonomy of morons, be they lawyers or judges or presidents or even that big scary guy down the block with a gun collection, a rebel flag, and a nasty glint in his eye that appears any time you talk about equal rights.
