Throw the bar open: a proposition (for milum)

Great Debates
61

I call bullshit on the whole damn story. Jail for a taillight violation? Please.

And why can’t Da Da pay his fines? You don’t dispute that Da Da was speeding. As far as i’m aware, every jurisdiction allows fines to be paid on a payment plan. Surely you’re not arguing that the poor should be able to speed with impunity for no other reason than their poverty.

And if Da Da can’t afford liability insurance, then Da Da can’t afford to be driving. If he causes an accident with another driver, he needs to be able to make that other driver whole. If he can’t do that, he needs to be taking public transportation.

And if your “other honest attorney” has been convicted of a crime sufficient to land him in federal prison, his license would already have been revoked. The bar tends to frown on having convicted felons in their midst.

62

Now now** Dewey**, you can’t run Alabama from New York and you can’t imperatively declare “bullshit” on the truth. Now please cool off and apologize for your rash declaration.
Thank you.

63

** Enron’s legal and administrative fees will reach over $ 1,000,000,000**

Fees due attorneys and accountants = $ 1,000,000,000 Paid in full up front.

Reimbursments to creditors and stockholders who are owed more than 60,000,000,000 @ .16 on the 1.00 = 9,600,000,000
To be paid at the discretion of the court.

[ Report]

… the first filing was under the name of the obscure Enron Metals & Commodity Corp., a metal-trading business with 55 employees and one-half of 1 percent of Enron’s assets. Why? Because it was headquartered in the jurisdiction of New York’s Southern District Bankruptcy Court, which is one of the nation’s more prominent calm harbors against storms of angry employees, creditors, federal regulators and politicians. Delaware and Chicago enjoy similar pro-company reputations.

Part of the attraction of the New York district, some lawyers say, is its demonstrated willingness to let a bankrupt company hire vast armies of lawyers.

“When the Texas attorney general’s office sought to transfer the Enron bankruptcy case to Houston, where it belonged, one of the reasons for the request was the fact that professional fees seem to soar out of control in cases in New York and Delaware,” said Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott.

**“Everyone agrees that the professional fees in the Enron case are in the stratosphere.” **

Lynn LoPucki, a bankruptcy professor at the University of California at Los Angeles law school who studies professional fees, said Enron has gotten favorable rulings that allowed chief executive Ken Lay to help pick his successor- Stephen Cooper, who denied requests to appoint an independent trustee to run the company; and, of course, granted Enron almost complete freedom to hire as many well-paid professionals as it deemed necessary.

**Judges, he said, don’t want to upset companies or the law firms that handle the big bankruptcies. To do so would likely draw future bankruptcies (and the attendant fees) to other judicial districts, where the local lawyers would get the spoils. And local bar associations’ recommendations play a significant role in the appointment of federal bankruptcy judges to their 14-year terms.

“You don’t bite that hand that feeds you,”** LoPucki said.** “A judge whose rulings lose the next 10 big cases to other places won’t get reappointed.”**

  • (Welcome freemen, to the happy wacky world of attorneys.)*
64

Assuming the tale of Da Da is true arguendo, I could answer your question, but you won’t answer mine, so feh.

And about Enron: what’s your point? That multibillion dollar corporations try to hire a lot of representation when they go bankrupt? That forum shopping can be problematic? That public officials occassionally take actions they otherwise wouldn’t to guarantee reeelection or reappointment? How is that relevant to what you’re proposing, making unlicensed people eligible to represent others in court? Give every man, woman, child and housepet in America a license to practice law and Enron is still going to hire the exact same lawyers and accountants that it’s hiring now.

65

The point Mister Pravnik, is that there exists an unabashed collusion between lawyers and judges. And if you think that this unholy union is acceptable then there is not much of a chance for a departure point for any further discussion.

66

Uh huh. Please demonstrate this unholy collusion between lawyers and judges, and show how this would be solved if liscensing were no longer required. Then, please answer the questions I asked you several days ago. Embarass me.

67

Since this is Great Debates, I’ll try to answer the question without insulting you, although you’ve made this a little personal. Chances are, a decent lawyer could do a lot of stuff for Da Da that you wouldn’t have been able to do. Actually, if you were to represent someone, there’s a good chance they’d be slaughtered.

I base this on my observations of your debating style in this forum. Your idea of answering somebody’s argument seems to be to present a marginally relevant anecdote with a little spin thrown in for good measure. You can’t seem to present a decent answer to a fair question.

I see unrepresented parties do stuff like this all the time in court and they usually get crushed. They just can’t grasp what’s important and what’s not important and eventually the judge just loses patience with them.

Ironically, their total lack of competence blinds them to the very incompetence they suffer from. When they lose, they blame some sort of conspiracy or whatever and don’t learn much, if anything. The fact that you seem to believe that you could do just as good a job as an attorney makes me think that you suffer from this sort of blindness.

Anyway, I’m really not trying to insult you, but I think that your own posts provide an example of one of the problems that would arise if the bar were opened up. You’d get a lot more people who are incompetent but don’t realize it causing problems for their clients.

68

Didn’t Frank Abagnale Jr.(showcased in Catch Me If You Can) accomplish this?

69

Bad analogy, IMHO.

If I’m not allowed to golf on these courses, I CAN GO SOMEWHERE ELSE TO PLAY GOLF. My clubs are not locked up until I take enough lessons to get my handicap down to a acceptable level.

70

It was possible in many states years ago; however, it was phased out in the past few decades. For example, a friend of the family (and also my Cub Scout organizer) who was… counts fingers probably 40 when I was a scout in the late '80s was the last lawyer in New York to challenge the bar exam successfully. I’m not sure how long he had practiced before then, but it had to be quite a while.

71

There are gaping holes in your story. I continue to call bullshit.

As for the rest of your posts – what pravnik said.

72

The analogy was only designed to illustrate that competence-based filters – like the bar exam – are reasonable, and in many cases necessary, means of keeping an operation efficient. Don’t try to make into something more than it is.

73

What, me non-responsive? Where on God’s Earth did you Attorney-at-Laws get the bright idea that verbal exchanges on the Great Debates Forum are mere trials cortem exterus.

Non-responsive? The audacity! While the lawyers here hem and haw, and dip and dodge, the bitter sad question I asked goes unanswered…

** Why does the United States system of justice favor the rich citizen over the poor citizen in violation on the Constitution’s guarantee of equal rights for all?**

Is this not the case- are poor men receiving equal justice?
Does the Constitution not guarantee equal justice under the law?
Do most lawyers not hire their talents to the highest bidder?

Jeez! What a crew. Ok, I give up. I will painstakingly play your pedant word game and answer all of your simple, out-of-the-park questions. Jeez!

74

For the same basic reason that the housing market favors the rich over the poor. You have the right to a fair trial – you do not have the right to the best trial possible. The Constitutution does not require that every person receive identical legal representation, just that everyone receive competent representation.

75

Nitpick: There’s no right to an attorney in civil matters.

76

Does the law favor the rich? To a certain degree, yes it does. You know what else favors the rich? Everything else on the whole fricken’ planet. It’s not due to any conspiracy or design; it’s an inevitable fact of life. Despite that, lawyers actually do a great deal to try make the system as equitable as possible and give the little guy a fair shake. We require ourselves to do a certain amount of legal work pro bono. We act as court appointed counsel to defendants who couldn’t afford a lawyer otherwise. We give them the same representation as we would to somebody who walked into our office and paid us. Could the system be better? Yes. Any system could be better, and good lawyers strive to make it so. As to how the introduction of unliscensed attorneys would make the system better, we’re waiting.

77

Sorry. I tend to look at the legal world through criminal-colored glasses. But lucwarm is right - my comment applies to the criminal world, not the civil world.

78

Not so Bricker, all American citizens have a constitutional right to a fair trial. The “best trial possible” as semantically defined by the Constitution would simply be the “fairest trial possible”, and every citizen is due this process.
No more - no less. Anything less would be an injustice.

And as for you **pravnikp/b], how refreshing to hear a direct comment from a member of the bar. Your admission that ours is not a classless society and that you and your kind pro bono the poor on occasion to compensate. I’m sure that the poor folks that you have represented in the past without charging, felt blessed.

And now, anyone else want to come forth and admit that the rich are recieving more favorable decisions in our courts than the poor? Dewey? Lucwarm? Gelding? Anyone?

79

I wouldn’t put it exactly that way, but I will say that folks with more money, all other things being equal and generally speaking, get better legal representation than those with less money.

I would add that as pravnik points out, rich folks tend to get better services in general compared to poor folks.

For what it’s worth, this troubles me. In an ideal world, everyone would get equal quality services. However:

(1) Opening the bar would not achieve this goal – the rich would still pay a premium for the best legal representation.

(2) History shows that taking radical steps towards wealth equalization can cause a lot of misery. The only sensible approach is to take baby steps and to be pragmatic.

(3) Wealth redistribution requires wealth to begin with. As a practical matter, capitalism has proven to be a terrific way to generate wealth, although ironically, inequality is a (necessary?) byproduct of capitalism.

(4) Thus, we must tolerate a certain amount of inequality in the quest to build a more just society.

(5) The Constitution does not require equality of legal representation, at least according to the vast body of judicial decisions interpreting the Constitution. (no, I don’t have a cite, but come on!!)

(6) You are free of course to argue for any interpretation of the Constitution you desire. However, the fact that you make flat assertions about what is required by the Constitution as if you are 100% correct without acknowledging that case law holds differently suggests to me that you are sadly ignorant of the law.

(7) Your own posts demonstrate some of the problems in opening up the bar – you are woefully ignorant, but (apparently) unaware of your ignorance. If you were an attorney, making pie-in-the-sky arguments about the constitution, you would be doing your clients a disservice.

80

So say you. But that’s NOT what the Constitution means - it’s what you want it to mean. In this country, we have a system for determining what the Constitution means – an entire branch of government, in fact, dedicated to interpreting the Constitution and our other laws. And they have defined attorney performance as follows, insofar as criminal trials go:

Strickland v. Washington, 466 US 668 (1984).
Not “the best”. Not “equal in quality to the prosecution,” or “equal in quality to the rich guy we tried last wekk,” but simply “reasonably effective assistance.”

That’s what the Constitution means. You may not like it. There are a number of things I don’t like the Constitution to mean, and that I wish would change. Unlike you, however, I recognize that my wishes are of no moment, and that there is an actual body of people whose decisions about what the Constitution means are authoritive.

So if you wish to argue that we SHOULD view the Constitution your way, have at it. But don’t tell me that’s what the Constitution says, because it doesn’t.

  • Rick