The Bar

Lawyers receive quite a lot of criticism and harassment in America. In researching this book, I came across many scholarly writings by lawyers seeking to understand this criticism. (How pitiful that is.) As with any mass movement, some points are true and some are not. Sticking with the basics, what actions do lawyers take in our society?

• they write and debate most of the laws in legislatures
• they daily prosecute and defend using these laws
• they become the judges sitting on our courts
• they create laws and precedents that live on for hundreds of years after them, affecting millions or billions of people
• they create a legal vocabulary and body of legal opinion and thought of meaning mainly to themselves
• they band together in groups, firms and organizations to protect themselves from external attack
• they regulate their own behavior
• they set their own pay scale

While the actions of attorneys in society are necessary on some level, and therefore have some market value, you will notice nothing in the list above concerning production of a good or original service. Lawyers work only within the abstract system they have created over the last several centuries.

Since lawyers self-regulate, they are able to structure the system to their benefit, restricting outsiders from offering legal services, for example. This monopoly has allowed them to gain tremendous monetary wealth and power in America, all without actually producing anything that is needed for the basic tasks of life.

A Consumer might ask, “But don’t lawyers help to reveal truth in court?” Perhaps, but only as a side effect of what’s really happening. Our system of legal justice, based on competing advocates (attorneys), is not designed to reveal truth, but it does reveal who has hired the best advocate. The assumption is that truth will be revealed when lawyers compete to win a court conflict, but we know that this is not the case, and sometimes the outcome of a case is a travesty of justice and mockery of the truth.

The power of lawyers should not be underestimated. The power of Hitler or Napoleon or Stalin died with their last breath. You and I are still living under laws that were written and passed two hundred years ago. The state may, at a whim, dredge up an ancient code under which you will be prosecuted and punished.

This eternal nature of legal regulation means that our country has no natural way of expelling legal waste. Most obsolete laws are never taken off the books, and simply go dormant, becoming a weight that we must carry through life as citizens. Imagine eating that doughnut in a moment of foolishness and carrying it with you for the rest of your life, buying pants to fit it and taking it on every vacation. That is our legal system.

A better system would tag each law with an expiration date. If the legislature does not explicitly renew the law with an individual vote, the law would lapse. This natural fiber would cleanse the legal system’s colon, ensuring that the incomprehensible glut of regulations we have today could not accumulate.

Why will this system never be implemented? Because it is in the lawyers’ best interests to have a perpetual legal code at every point. Each new generation of attorneys adds another layer of regulation, securing their seats for life. The humus of past law provides rich fertilizer for the growth of incomprehensibly intricate legal weeds.

While lawyers do perform some valid and useful services to society, their profession has attracted a layer of opportunists second to none. For example, Merck’s drug Vioxx was intended to treat osteoarthritis but turned out to cause cardiovascular problems for some patients. Merck voluntarily withdrew the drug from the market in September 2004. The number of lawsuits is expected to be upwards of 100,000, though Merck asserts that far fewer people have legitimate claims.

A quick search for Vioxx at the Internet search engine Google reveals the true nature of the situation. Most hits related to Vioxx are on legal firms’ web sites, encouraging former Vioxx users to call immediately for a free consultation. This vulture behavior is repulsive. The world needs a few vultures, but no one likes to watch them feed.

The sexual abuse cases in the Catholic Church are another wonderful gift from heaven to trial lawyers. I regularly see advertisements in national newspapers trolling for victims. Once again, online searches for related terms uncover law firms on the prowl for easy cash. I have a hard time reading accounts of such abuse and could not imagine considering the situation as a ‘profit center’ for my firm.

Please accept my apologies in that this is all a bit depressing. I’ll attempt to lighten the mood now.

From time to time we hear an amusing story that highlights the penultimate silliness of the Paraducer castes, and lawyers provide them at a good clip. An associate of mine who is an inventor alerted me to a United States patent that qualifies.

The patent system was created by attorneys, government attorneys, no less, and so carries the Good Paraducing stamp of approval. Inventors have a love/hate relationship with the patent system, loving the meager protection it provides, and hating the expense of obtaining a patent and the meager protection it provides. Any inventor can point out patents that should not have been granted, and I’ll do that right now. One is U.S. Patent 6,368,227, entitled, “Method of swinging on a swing.” Here’s the summary:

"A method of swing(ing) on a swing is disclosed, in which a user positioned on a standard swing suspended by two chains from a substantially horizontal tree branch induces side to side motion by pulling alternately on one chain and then the other."

When I saw the title page and the abstract, I thought it was a hoax, because no one should be granted a patent for something children have been doing since Cro-Magnon Man. Then I searched the patent database myself and sure enough, it’s there. Let me warn you not to eat or drink while reading this patent (at www.uspto.gov), as I was, because there is a small but significant chance of choking while laughing. My favorite line is, “Young children often need help to climb onto a swing, and may need a push (sometimes even an “underdog” push) to begin swinging.” God help us!

Some wry individual, God bless him, paid real money to apply for a patent on swinging, not in the usual back and forth mode, but side to side. Every kid in the universe with two arms has done this, but this fellow got a patent on it, showing up the lack of thought that has gone into the creation of the entire patent system, and probably winning a large bet to boot. A slight bit of hope is provided by the reexamination of the patent, which cancelled all the claims in July 2003. For over a year I was a swinging patent infringer, but now I can again swing freely.

The entire patent system is a Paraducer masterpiece. One has to be an attorney or approved agent to practice before the Patent and Trademark Office. Patent examiners are indoctrinated into the system (they call it ‘training’) and think in very narrow, counterintuitive, legally prescribed ways. The process for filing a patent application and the format of the application is so complex that one needs several how-to books to do it oneself, or an attorney must be paid upwards of ten to twenty thousand dollars for a basic filing. Patent litigation is very specialized and difficult for the average person to understand, in spite of the fact that the concept, “he stole my invention,” is universally meaningful. This is all intentional, and provides job security for the legal caste.