I'm not putting you down. I'm explaining that, by getting yourself into a snit (ha ha!) you've just revealed precisely why those ethical demands are important. It is precisely because you are human that you can get angry feeling that you've been dishonored and treated unfairly and, as such, you can overstep the bounds and say things that make the profession look bad. That statement doesn't make lawyers look especially good. It makes it look as if an attorney lords it over you.
I have no idea what you mean by red over expert but I'm guessing that, if you think I'm saying leftist solidarity is more important than expertise or some hogwash, then you'll need to go and read the blog more carefully because that is precisely what I'm not saying. Nor, in fact, is Charles Bosk -- who is certainly not a leftist!
Nothing that was said here indicates you and others aren't competent. What has been said si that, as we know about every other facet of life, incomepetence, corruption, wrongdoing, abuses of power are systematically produced in this system. They are not accidental attributes of certain fucked up blokes, but it is _bound_ to happen by the very way things are organized. Bosk demonstrates this quite nicely in forgive and rembmer, showing how the very way ethics are instilled makes it difficult to pursue ethical violation later when the degress have been handed out.
Rober Jackall pursues the same tack in Moral Mazes showing how ethical wrongdoing is not an accident, but built into the very structure of corporate life.
Further, technical competence is _not_ what people get in trouble for in the professions, as you perfectly well know. They get in trouble for violating ethical codes of conduct and because of their politics. They get in trouble when they fail to recognize those ethical norms and continually flaunt them. And the very foundation of those ethical norms is the demand that an attorney posture himself in the very way Carl just described: that we are here to help you, that we recognize how must we can do you harm, and that we voluntarily humble ourselves in the face of that knowledge to do everything we can to do right by you. Whatever I, as an attorney or physician might lose, it is nothing compared to what you might lose: your life, your freedom, your money, your livelihood.
Finally, all professions understand technical competence as a social product -- if you want to get going on Socrates ask carrol about his reading of socrates and knowledge. Thus, it is not technical incompetence that will get you booted out of law school, tho it will send down the ranks of the training grounds. Technical errors are punished only in a ritual way precisely because knowledge is understood as social and the result of social processes, not something owned by the individual but owned by the profession. No one is bitching about technical incompetence, but to the things that happen when technical competence is subverted to money interests, bureaucratic imperatives, political ideologies, and just the fact that the bulk of people who go into law are people who are there because it "runs in the family".
One of the biggest rude awakenings I got was teaching pre-law and pre-med students who looked at me blankly when I talked about craftsmanship and about the love of the professions because one wants to "do good."
HUh, they said? I'm pre-law because grandpa was.
Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org