Shakespeare Didn't Really Want To Kill All The Lawyers...Nobody's perfect.
Posted on 09/19/2014 6:01:39 AM PDT by reaganaut1
One of the Bard’s often-quoted lines is Dick the Butcher’s admonition in Henry VI, Part 2, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
That idea, argues lawyer David Epstein, is mistakenly thought to mean that Shakespeare was antagonistic toward the legal profession. Instead, as we read in this Wall Street Journal piece, Shakespeare actually meant “to portray lawyers as the guardians of the rule of law who stand in the way of a fanatical mob.”
Whether you agree with Epstein’s interpretation or not, more than four centuries after Shakespeare’s time, we should do something about lawyers, something that entails no violence.
That something is to deregulate the legal profession.
To repeat a point I have made here before, most companies and professions like regulation. They seek it, happily trading off some freedom for security from the blustery winds of wide-open competition. One of the organized interest groups that has been very successful in getting government to stifle competition so it can act like a cartel is the legal profession.
It used to be egregiously cartel-like, requiring that members adhere to fee schedules, thus shutting down price competition, and forbidding lawyers from advertising. Both of those strictures, embodied in the Canons of Legal Ethics, have been wiped away, though. The Supreme Court ruled that mandatory fee schedules violated the Sherman Act in Goldfarb v. Virginia State Bar in 1975 and the prohibition against advertising was similarly struck down by the Court in Bates v. State Bar of Arizona in 1977.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
We have wide open competition in the legal profession. And I would like to point out that lawyers have assisted in policing the abuses of the governments lately.
Correct. As easy as it is to rip apart lawyers, actually putting about 10 seconds of thought into the role they perform in society reveals that a world without them would be very undesirable.
We can kill the profession (or at least make it more professional) by tort reform. LOSER PAYS ALL COSTS INCURRED OR GOES TO JAIL AND LOSES LICENSE!
Who cares what Shakespeare thought or didn’t think....It’s still a good idea!!! For most of them!!!
Lawyers are a necessary evil, kinda like cold viruses. You have to have one every few years to keep your immune/legal system functioning.................
People USED to settle their own differences: shoot, burn, poison, kill, rape, lie, cheat and loot. There are SO many ways to kill, maim, injure and "get even."
Limit contingent fees to some multiple of a lawyer’s reasonable hourly rate. And expand the number of situations where the loser pays the winner’s attorney’s fees.
TOO OFTEN there is no "winner" and "loser"--just compromises.
TOO OFTEN there are "contingency" fees: lawyer gets paid ONLY if s/he wins.
TOO OFTEN, both sides are partly right and partly wrong, so the lawyers have to hammer out SOMETHING both sides can "live with."
The seven deadly sins prevail and Lucifer usually wins once out of three times. I'm using the Biblical 1/3.
lawyers are parasites
Tell you what. That line:
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
Brought down the house.
Shakespeare Didn't Really Want To Kill All The Lawyers...Nobody's perfect.
OK, him too.
I have always thought that the big mistake is allowing lawyers to become legislators and MAKE the laws that guarantee them an income. The more laws, the more opportunities for lawyers to profit. The incentive naturally favors the development of bigger and bigger government. Of course no good attorney would ever admit that he voted for a law to increase income for attorneys, he will find a way to make even himself believe that there was a good and sufficient reason for passing law number 1001 on the same subject, a mere thousand being insufficient for the task.
The biggest reform to the legal profession should be a severe crackdown on “barratry”.
In common (not naval) law, barratry is the offense committed by people who are “overly officious in instigating or encouraging prosecution of groundless litigation” or who bring “repeated or persistent acts of litigation” for the purposes of profit or harassment.
If litigation is for the purpose of silencing critics, it is known as a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP), which is an offense. 28 states have enacted SLAPP laws, but there is no federal statute.
In the U.S. states of California, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington, barratry is a misdemeanor. In Texas, however, barratry is a misdemeanor on the first conviction, but a felony on subsequent convictions.
Though very rare in the law, courts on their own may determine “Vexatious litigation”, which means filing endless harassment lawsuits against some individual or group, or just in general with great frequency, abusing the court system. In such circumstances, judges may bar the responsible individual from filing lawsuits in the future.
In any event, a national crackdown on barratry would be a great first step in civil law reform, followed by limits on contingency fee attorneys, along with settlement limitations and punitive damages decisions.
This guy would have a point... if there were a shortage of lawyers in any state’s bar. But there aren’t. There are more licensed bar-passing lawyers in the world than there are sewer rats. I would contrast this to the medical profession where there actually is a shortage of doctors in many fields. We can argue the pros and cons of that, but it’s hard to argue with a straight face that there’s a shortage of lawyers. In fact, I know dozens of lawyers who don’t practice law because there are simply more lawyers than there are jobs for lawyers.
It’s been lawyers whom have written most laws; with such verbiage and parsing they can self-perpetuate their careers for eternity; or use the latter of the Law(s) to subvert the spirit of the same
Was it not one, whom was recently President, who was able to parse the meaning of the two-letter word ‘is’? Not that anything they laid down as ‘punishment’ met the meaning of the word....like the police’s blue wall, there’s the black wall
That’s a heart condition of the human race, my FRiend. You don’t need a law degree to design, promote, and pass self-serving laws. If lawyers were somehow magically banned from Congress, do you think the type of conduct you describe would suddenly stop?
Not a chance.
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Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Or maybe it's just the lawyer in me speaking.
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