Who do you think writes mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines? The legislatures of our great nation are not staffed by ice cream truck drivers, bricklayers or physicians.
That sounds really bad. There should be a law against it. Oh that’s right, there is. And why would the generic company stop manufacturing the good when they are invariably going to win the law suit? Oh that’s right, they won’t. Unless the patent holder gets an injunction, which they won’t, because they are invariably going to lose the case.
There are problems in the patent system, but making ones up isn’t very helpful.
RNATB:
Neither are they composed entirely of lawyers, so blame the fucking legislators who passed the ridiculous laws and leave the rest of us who acknowledge and oppose the ridiculousness of those laws out of it entirely.
Jesus Christ. Have you heard of Venn diagrams?
I never suggested that my personal conclusions are grand. What a load of hooey. I don’t like lawyers in general. There are some individual lawyers that I like. There are some judges that I like. We’ve already established that there are no scientific surveys of the whole system, which means that we must rely on individual examples in forming our opinions. Millions of Americans have formed our opinions about the legal profession through such personal experiences. Some like the profession, millions don’t. That doesn’t make it right or wrong. It makes it an opinion.
I think that the OP, the closest he/she has come to stating a case is that on balance the system and lawyers are alright. I disagree. The reasons have been stated earlier. I think the profession is entirely too complacent. There are no studies is enough complacency.
Ordinarily I do not point out that I am a civil litigation and trials (and occasionally appellate) lawyer. It does not ordinarily add to the weight of my posts. I make an exception here because a lot of my personal opinion is based on over two decades of experience dealing with lawyers. Mostly representing clients, occasionally acting as a pro tem judge or mediator or arbitrator and long in the past as an employee of other lawyers. I am not simply spouting unsupported prejudices, I have biases built on years of experience. I treat opposing counsel as honorable until I find out otherwise, which is way too often.
I do think that there should be comprehensive studies on the legal system and lawyers. It is a very important function of government. The complete lack of such studies is not an accident: it would form the basis for a call for major reforms and the interested parties do not want to do that.
Heh I’ve been a lawyer for years as well and guess what - like the majority of our tribe, I’m not a litigator. Maybe you litigators are in fact all assholes - I dunno; but most lawyers are not litigators, which is a point you are missing. 
I had heard that there are such things as “transactional” lawyers, I meet them as often as I see beasts with one horn, such as unicorns, narwhals, rhinoceroses, etc. I truly believe that they exist and have licenses to practice law. I was unaware that this encompassed most lawyers.
And yes, the majority of litigators are assholes, for lack of a less accurate term.
They are composed mostly of lawyers, and they all do the same stupid shit. Personally, I don’t have a problem with lawyers.
However, if somebody has a problem with the way the law works, who the hell else is to blame?
Oh, they exist - as in-house counsel to every major company in the country, for example; doing taxes, reviewing contracts, dealing with regulations, registering intellectual property and generally conducting business.
In-court lawyering is merely the tip of the iceburg. I do not have handy statistics available, but just look at major law firms - “litigation” is only one department in the general run of your average law firm.
Generally, a large firm will have several practice areas or departments: “litigation” will be one, but then there several others, such as business or commercial law, intellectual property, tax, real estate. Now some of those may involve a certain amount of litigation, but that is generally handled by a few specialists - the majority of big-firm lawyers never see the inside of a courtroom (or only very rarely).
Just think it through logically. Every major deal must be “lawyered” but very few of them are ever litigated. The number of lawyers needed to facilitate transactions that do not go to court far outnumber the number of lawyers needed to deal with dispute resolution where things have broken down to the point where negotiations and agreements cannot resolve differences, let alone dealing with accidents and the like.
This is one reason why the anti-lawyering folks are, as it were, talking out of there asses. They don’t know what most lawyers actually do. And that evidently includes some lawyers - some who specialize in litigation such as yourself, who think that lawyers dealing with transactions are as rare as unicorns, when in fact they are quite ubiquitous in business and industry.
When most folks think of “lawyers” they think of courtroom antics and famous lawsuits; or they think of the criminal justice system. But such, while exciting, is only a part of lawyering. The other part is, if you like, keeping the wheels of our business culture moving - a role shared with other specialists, such as accountants.
Perhaps the starting point should be to, I don’t know, do a bit of research? Which reveals that the American Bar Association has consistently opposed mandatory minimum sentences and has called on the federal, state and territorial governments to repeal them.
(My underlining; citations omitted.)
Lawyers don’t make the law. Legislatures do, filled with representatives elected by the people. Calling for mandatory minimums gets “tough on crime” politicians elected, regardless of their professional backgrounds. That’s where mandatory minimums come from, not lawyers.
RNATB:
First, the post to which I was responding explicitly blamed lawyers for harsh drug laws and stupid sentencing guidelines. Not legislatures, not politicians, not lawyers-who-are-politicians-and-who-voted-for-the-harsh-drug-laws-and-stupid-sentencing-guidelines,* but lawyers. That’s fucking stupid. That’s like blaming white people for the continuing vitality of Roe v. Wade because the Supreme Court is made up mostly of white people.
Second, when you say “they are composed mostly of lawyers,” are you talking about state legislatures as well as federal? Do you have data to support this? And are you counting any politician who happens to have a law degree as a “lawyer,” whether or not they’ve ever practiced law?
Third, when you say “they all do the same stupid shit,” who is the “they” you’re referring to? Legislatures? Lawyers in legislatures? If a legislature passes a stupid law, but over half of the legislators with law degrees vote against the law, are you going to blame the lawyers? What if forty percent of the lawyers in the legislature vote against the law? Thirty percent? What if one legislature composed mostly of lawyers passes a stupid law and another legislature composed mostly of lawyers rejects the same stupid law? At what point do you realize that your beef isn’t with lawyers, it’s with people who pass stupid laws?
Come to that, at what point do you acknowledge that having a law degree might actually make someone better equipped to realize that a law is stupid, to recognize the ways in which it’s stupid, or to figure out how to make it less stupid?
Oh, lordy. We have this thing called a federal constitutional republic, see, and the great thing about it is that lots and lots of different people have input into the way the law works, and blame gets diffused all up and down the line. Blame voters. Blame non-voters. Blame lobbyists. Blame interest groups. Blame political parties. Blame legislators. Blame staffers. Blame advisors. Blame ballot measures. Blame town councils. Blame congressional districting. Blame the president. Blame the governors. Blame mayors. Blame the county seat. Blame the agency heads. Blame the agencies. Blame the regulatory bodies. Blame the people who write regulations. Blame the people who implement regulations. Blame law enforcement. Blame magistrates. Blame judges. Blame juries. Blame law clerks. Blame law firms. Blame prosecutors. Blame public defenders. Blame plaintiffs. Blame defendants. Blame Valerie Plame. Blame big business. Blame small business. Blame academia. Blame the market. Blame the Constitution. Blame the Framers. Blame the Puritans. Blame the church. Blame the media. Blame the message. Blame spokespeople. Blame spin doctors. Blame the system. Blame the dissidents. Blame the agitators. Blame the Peter Principle. Blame cronyism. Blame classism. Blame shadowy cabals. Blame the status quo. Blame standard operating procedure. Blame institutional inertia. Blame society.
Blame laziness, blame self-interest, blame greed, blame corner-cutting and cognitive biases and an ill-developed capacity for critical reflection, if you want. But don’t single out lawyers as some undifferentiated mass and blame them for those things, because person by person they’re no more or less susceptible to them than anyone else.
- And certainly not the United States Sentencing Commission and the various state sentencing commissions – which are not part of the legislature (although they are composed of lawyers) and which, contrary to your post, are the bodies that actually draft the sentencing guidelines.
I thought we had long established that the American Bar Association opposing something merely proves the problem is real, and actually their fault. Their opposition condemns them - mere words are insufficient. They should be disembowelling themselves on the steps of the Capitol, at the very minimum.
Honestly, some of you guys are so politically naïve.
Is anyone ever “embowelled”? Are we all?