Do lawyers suck?

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

At 01:36 PM 1/7/00 -0500, Nathan Newman wrote:
>This is one of the enduring myths that feeds the lure of the lawyer-hero.
The
>Supreme Court did almost nothing under the Constitution to substantively end
>segregation, with the singular but important exception of Brown v. Board of
>Education.  And remember, that was done to overturn a previous Supreme Court
>decision in Plessy v. Ferguson which had been part of a whole post-Civil War
>Supreme Court legacy that overturned the 1875 legislative Civil Rights
Acts that
>would have barred segregation in the South.

-- snip ---


>Only because that same lawyer culture creates a bias against regulatory and
>administrative procedures that would be a far more efficient and responsible
>system of curbing corporate crime.  Creating a lottery system of justice with
>"private attorney generals" is an anti-democratic system of evading formal
>democratic regulation of corporate abuse.   Our contingent-lawyer system of
>private justice may be better than nothing, but in many ways it also acts
as an
>ideological salve for individuals that undermines demands for more
comprehensive
>social reform.
>

OK, I concede, lawyers are not folk heroes - but I would not summarily
villify them either.  I guess there are diffrent kinds among them, the
heroic NLG/ACLU types, the crypto-fascist ilk with the prosecutorial zeal
(c.f. il duce giuliani), the corporate whores, the ambulance chasers and
the 'regualar' type who just do the job to make a living.  The latter are
probably the most numerous, but the former are probably the most visible in
popular culture.  So I guess a more accurate picture of the profession is
that you have a rather small but visible group of folk heroes, a larger and
more visible group of scumbags prostituting their services to the powers
that be or the highest bidder, and a very large but mostly invisible group
of law workers just doing their job.

wojtek