Thank you, jti, I was afraid of that.
I hope I am not alone in doubting the legitimacy of any government which endures a peasant revolt ( I am looking at you, Mexico ). Villeins ye were, and villeins ye remain, eh?
( or somesuch )
Why would the peasants seek to overthrow the “ordered society based on law”?
Maybe because they were starving?
A love for the law instead of a love for the people is quite an elegant reason for not prefering lawyers in legislature. That and the percieved habit of lawyers to twist meanings behind their statements. We have enough of that from the nonlawyer politicos.
The lawyers in Congress shot down the cap limit on malpractice suits, petitioned for by Doctors and Hospitals. As a result, we get to pay much higher medical bills, our insurance has soared and hospitals are deliberately cutting back on help, endangering our lives.
The main reason? Because lawyers look after lawyers, and lawyers make millions off of malpractice suits.
Congressional lawyers also shot down time limits on certain lawsuits. If you work for a city, get injured on the job and take them to court, most never settle. They keep delaying the suit until, hopefully, you will accept a fraction of your initial suit or die. I am personally aware of several such suits which have been going on for over 10 years.
In our estimation, the cost of fighting each suit has gone far beyond the origonal desired settlement involved. Only the lawyers are making money.
Here’s a concrete example of what the OP is getting at:
In 1986, a huge tax simplification was passed. It condensed all of the brackets that existed before into two brackets. It eliminated preferences for capital gains; they were taxed the same as ordinary income. It eliminated a host of deductions.
It was passed at the time with the clear understanding that it was a bipartisan compromise meant to last.
I read an article at that time (I don’t remember where or by whom, sorry) that said there was no way this would be the last tax law, because lawyers make a large amount of money from practicing tax law. One way to goose the amount of money made in this area is to keep passing new laws.
So, today we have preferential treatments for capital gains, five brackets, an alternative minimum tax, and so on.
And both the Republican & Democratic candidates for president are promising more.
Case closed.
The thing is, these people we’re talking about are not Lawyers at all - they’re politicians. They’ve all been politically active since they ran for class president in junior high, and they may have law degrees, but that’s only because they think it will help them get elected. If someone convinced them that you needed a degree in physics to reach the Senate, Washington would be full of physicists, and you know what? It would still be the same guys.
Those people are first and formost politiciance. Anything else is just flash.
The lawyers in congress are for the most part professional politicians. The reason they do not favor tort reform is NOT that they will make big bucks when they get out, but that they rake in big bucks in campaign contributions from the large law firms, et al, while they are in.
Good case in point was the flap a week or so ago regarding Al Gore, Clinton, and a possible quid pro quo for Clinton’s veto of tort reform in exchange for a rather handsome contribution from a prominent Houston law firm [Fox News Channel].
I still feel that the country would be best served by removing the professional politicians [lawyers, etc.] thru term limits. IMHO, this would greatly open the door for a more “reflective” representation. In addition, more time would be effectively spent on “meaningful” legislation rather than laws designed to help those who fill coffers.
Note: I disagree in advance when I say the only “GOOD” professional politician, is a “DEAD” one. I also apologize for the slight hijack
Take Back Your Government, by Robert A. Heinlein, edited by Jerry Pournelle.
Written in 1946, finally published in the 1990s. A short course in how to be a practical politician in your spare time, with Pournelle’s annotations on how things have changed in the half century since.
Most lawyers who run for office, says Heinlein with a 1946 perspective, do so out of patriotism…because they want to give what they can to help their country. (This was before being a state legislator became a full-time job, with pay to match.)
He does make some salient points on why there is a disproportionate share of lawyers in public office, and critiques some of the ideas lawyers have. (Science, for example, is forward-looking; the law, backward-looking and concerned with precedent. So a lawyer attempting to make a law regulating some aspect of scientific development – recombinant DNA might be a good contemporary example – is automatically coming at it with precisely the “wrong” viewpoint to try to produce an intelligent law for the purpose.) He also fulminates a bit on the specialized language of the law. (My examples, not Heinlein’s: What on God’s green earth does it mean to “subrogate”? If I sell you a parcel of land and retain the mineral rights, why should it take six pages of fine print to make clear what I’m doing? And why should a parcel need to be resurveyed, except to make the lawyer and the surveyor some extra money? Did some of the land in it head west to seek its fortune? What is the point behind a deed of trust? Why is a mortgage written backwards from the loan it accompanies?)
Lawyers are experts in the system of law by which we rule ourselves as a social whole. There are good ones, and there are bad ones. Same as with any other profession.
And there are good men involved in politics, self-important egotists with thought only for their own success, and total creeps. Throw out the bad and keep the good. Who’s who? Figure that out at the polls. And if you didn’t vote in the primaries (if your state had one) and don’t vote in November, you have no right to cast aspersions on who’s in office – they’re there because you didn’t care enough to get rid of them legally.
To stand in the place of another for purposes of claiming a right. Most commonly used when the rights of an injured person are “subrogated” to his or her insurer, when the insurer has coughed up money for the injuries and is entitled by law to get that money back if the injured person wins money in a suit. In that case, the insured “stands in the place” of the injured person, in order to get that money back.
Okay, in part because legal language is indefensibly hyper-technical and verbose, which is why I am a big fan of the Plain English movement. But also in part because if we didn’t you’d come back five years later and say you didn’t mean to include oil rights, or rights to then-unknown-but-later-discovered minerals like “Polycarpia.”
Because if there is any doubt as to the exact legal boundaries of the land, you’re looking at a lawsuit waiting to happen when you’re neighbors sue you for building your garage on their land or the buyers you’re trying to sell the land to back out because you can’t convey clear title. Lawyers earn nothing extra regardless of whether a survey is or is not done, by the way.
It allows a third party (the trustee) to hold the deed to property until it is paid for, by-passing problems that might be encountered if the seller held the deed (like refusing to surrender it to the buyer) or if the buyer held the deed (like refusing to pay for the land). It’s nothing more than a fancy mortgage.
Because the mortgage is intended to secure the amount of the loan, so obviously the loan must come first.
That’s all for today; for tomorrow, read the next 50 pages in your textbook, and outline and be prepared to discuss all the cases cited therein.
The major problem here, IMHO, is that most people seem to like the creeps from their locale (i.e. Kennedy, Thurmond, whoever, doesn’t matter what political persuasion) while they dispise everyone else’s. The only way to rid ourselves of the scum and open the floodgates of fresh blood without the heavy baggage associated with years of backroom compromise, is to level the playing field across the board. This will also take care of (I think) the disportionate percentage of the legal beagles in both houses.
Most lawyers have as much disdain for Congress as anyone else. You should have heard my criminal law professor (who was a federal prosecutor for 15 years before retiring to teach) go on about the idiots in Congress who write the laws.
In addition, it should be noted that many lawyers have training in the sciences (my background is in computer science and mathematics). Also, generally, only bad lawyers go on to become politicians; the good ones stay lawyers.
So you write out EVERYTHING you can think of, just to be safe.
The law is complex because people want the law to be fair, and “fair” is a pretty damn complex concept. We could make the law very simple, but it wouldn’t be very fair, and people wouldn’t be any happier with it then they are with what we have now.
