An AIM conversation with Brian on the subject of lawyers I’ve elided some of my non-relevant asides to streamline the text.
18:26:44 darmon22: Hire some hotshot lawyer to get it back.
18:26:54 sunfallen: fuck that noise.
18:27:19 sunfallen: unless the lawyer can add hours on to my life… then we might talk.
18:27:53 darmon22: I find it odd that half of the world’s lawyers are American. The rest of the world somehow gets by.
18:28:41 sunfallen: Yeah. perhaps the rest of the world hates itself less…. *thinks about wars, bombings, fascism, and terrorism* … Okay, maybe europe hates itself less.
18:29:07 darmon22: In Japan, there’s a national limit on law school class sizes. They hatehatehate litigating.
18:29:42 darmon22: If a disagreement comes to court,there’s such a mutual sense of failure that it even got to that point that no one wants to show their face.
18:29:46 sunfallen: How much do japanese lawyers earn?
18:30:07 sunfallen: If only we could transplant that sense of shame and desire for harmony.
18:30:57 darmon22: Japan really does have a much larger middle class. The top CEOs make, like, $300,000.
18:31:08 sunfallen: Nice. And the janitors?
18:31:59 darmon22: They live modestly, but there is a sense that anyone who gives 40+ hours a week deserves to have health and security, so there’s no one on the street.
18:33:09 darmon22: The standard of living ends up somewhere like Norway, even though it’s far less socialized. Everything costs a fortune, nobody makes a huge fortune, but nobody works their ass off for squat like they do here
At one point in “Stranger in a Strange Land”, Michael Valentine, the title character, refers to the legal system, laws, and lawyers as a great goodness for healing differences. It’s probably a good thing I wasn’t drinking something at the time I read it, because it likely would have ended up spraying out through my nose onto the book.
And yet, maybe there is some validity to this perspective. We humans disagree quite a bit. And violence is not as uncommon an outcome as we might desire. The U.S. has done fairly well in terms of relatively little in the way of massive insurrections, domestic terrorism, civil wars, etc. Perhaps our legal/judicial/tort system, and lawyers in particular deserve a place alongside the stars of organized sports as a relatively healthy way to moderate the churning sea of conflict in which we live.
Perhaps the social democratic institutions and lower economic disparities of other industrialized nations serve a similar role. And to judge from statistics on violent crime, perhaps they do it better. Not that I’m pretending these countries are without lawyers.
groking lawyers ..
well .. heinlein hated lawyers. i think since michael valentine represented a true innocent in heinlein’s mythos, his statement was one of good intent — in its most perfect state, a legal system should indeed do exactly as michael valentine spoke — but imo that’s not what heinlein was saying about our legal system.
in all of his future history books where he covered the revolt against what america eventually turns into (which is a fundamentalist christian state), there’s reference to the night where they killed all the lawyers, heh. it’d take a revolution to make that sort of social change, that’s for sure.
i’m not sure there is a better alternative. it’s like asking for single payer healthcare, or pure communism. i do firmly believe in the incentive to compete, but i also see that the playing field is not level and a class structure does not ensure everyone’s right to exist, compete, excel, etc.
heh this is totally different than the comment i intended to post but i’m going to hit save anyhow because these are the sorts of conversations we have by IM. 😉
In theory, lawyers would be unnecessary if our legal code was simple and accessible to the layperson. I acknowledge that most of the nuance is there for a valid reason, but it rubs me the wrong way the same way car insurance does: government creates the need, but doesn’t provide the supply, so private vultures move in, and we end up paying not only for the attorney’s time, but also for her firm’s ad budget and profit requirements.
Having lived in a country like China where the rule of law is pretty much a joke, even though the laws are on the books and easy to understand, I have a much greater appreciation for an adversarial system that relies on the private bar to police not only private disputes, but to check the power of government. Could we reform some of the system? Absolutely. Should we first “kill all the lawyers?” I pray no.
word. i hear a lot of people bitching about our legal system, but there are not many, if any, examples of a system that works better on all accounts than ours. others may have us beat in a few areas, but certainly not all.