[lbo-talk] jury duty/Real expertise

[andie nachgeborenen]

1. Your objection misses the point. Drs don't create
illness, but they and medical researchers create the
knowledge that Drs use to cure them. Likewise Lawyers
don't, mainly, create the conflicts that the law is
designed to regulate.  Like the diseases that drs deal
with, these are generated exogenously.  The law that
lawyers in part create -- a set of rules to prevent
conflicts from degenerating into feud and violence and
to provide predictable guides for the conduct of
social life -- requires, like medicine, mastery of a
necessary (in many cases) highly specialized body of
technical knowledge that requires competent experts to
master and use them.

To put it differently and more simply, your objection
to the analogy fails because you are thinking of it
this way:

disease is to doctors as law is to lawyers

when the analogies are really:

disease is to drs as conflict is lawyers
medicine is to doctors as law is to lawyers.

The analogy is therefore correct and appropriate.

2. Lawyers don't per se, create law -- legislators and
agency officials do. Once upon a time judges made up a
lot of legal rules -- the common law -- and state
court judges still have this power, but don't really
use it that much. Law is mostly legislation and
regulation. Many of these laws are initially drafted
by lawyers in their capacity, typically, as lobbyists,
but in that capacity the point is not to benefit the
legal profession but their corporate masters.
Obviously the rules are influenced by those with power
in our society.  These people are not lawyers as
lawyers, who merely serve the powerful in the main.

4


> At 4:18 PM -0500 20/5/06, jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net
> wrote:
> 
> >Again however you trot out the MD analogy but
> doctors do not
> >primarily do this. This is not the primary let
> alone only reason for
> >their existence. It is a recent aspect thanks to
> capitalism. They
> >study and interpret physical systems, biology and
> chemistry. They
> >don't create diseases that only they can cure.
>

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