Legal foibles
Stern, Philip M.
Legal foibles LAWYERS ON TRIAL by Philip M. Stern Times Books. 265 pp. $12.50. Writer Philip Stern has discovered Thorstein Veblen—but without attribution. In 1899 Veblen maintained that the...
...The United States is the most legalistic, the most litigious, of all nations...
...Seen in that perspective, Stern's proposal for a National Legal Service is merely another cosmetic change...
...Miller (Arthur S. Miller is professor emertius of law at George Washington University and author of a forthcoming book, "Democratic Dictatorship," to be published by Greenwood Press...
...That means that some devilishly difficult political tradeoffs would have to be negotiated...
...Stern does succeed in being innovative in his call for a National Legal Service comparable to Britain's National Health Service...
...Certainly there would be no difficulty in gathering enough signatures for that...
...Lawyers, he said, are "exclusively occupied with the details of predatory fraud, either in achieving or in checkmating chicane, and success in the profession is therefore accepted as marking a large endowment of that barbarian astuteness which has always commanded man's respect and fear...
...Lawyers on Trial is Two jobs open at Rochester Patriot Progressive/alternative twice monthly newspaper: 1) Managing Editor—writes, edits, assigns copy...
...Their manifest function is to aid some of the disadvantaged and to protect the environment (broadly defined...
...They have had some success, but those victories should be viewed as payment the ruling class is willing to make to help stifle social discontent...
...Elitists themselves, these lawyers are highly paid servants of power—apparatchiks of the ruling class...
...That means that the latent, and more important, function of the public interest/public service bar is to help buttress the existing social order...
...A collection of anecdotes, it merely underscores what already is known...
...Why, for example, are there so many lawyers in the United States...
...Why are Americans so legalistic...
...With economic growth slowing and a zero-sum society being created, the money would have to come from existing programs...
...About two-thirds of the world's lawyers live in America...
...Stern does not suggest a price tag, but surely it would run into billions of dollars annually...
...The legal system, badly skewed in favor of those with wealth and property, simply does not reach most of the poor or the middle 70 per cent of the nation...
...With lawyers having a lock on most seats in the legislatures, and a complete monopoly on judging, it is by no means clear how an NLS could be created...
...Send resume: Rochester Patriot, 215 Alexander St., Roch...
...What, if any, correlation is there between the system of corporate capitalism and the monopoly of the bar...
...If he was correct, and I think he was and is, then the liberal theory of the rule of law, with its assumption that general rules applied even-handedly would produce effects beneficial to all, is a sham, a pretense, a pervasive social myth...
...If that be so, then the interest served by law in the final analysis is precisely that stated by Thrasymachus in Plato's Republic: the interest of the stronger...
...I do not mean to denigrate lawyers who disdain the corporate community, but do suggest that changes in law, when they come, tend to be cosmetic in nature...
...They are Band-aids pasted on an increasingly unwieldy and disjointed system, when major surgery is required...
...An NLS would have to be adequately funded...
...Those who control our bureau-cratized society have their hired guns...
...Many of those who are reached pay exorbitant fees (as in probate matters...
...Surely Stern is accurate as far as he goes, and that is reason enough that this book should be read, and heeded...
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...Staff and volunteers work collectively...
...The legal system today, under corporate capitalism, differs little from the past...
...On these and other questions Stern is silent...
...In a class society, such as the United States, imbalances in availability of legal services could scarcely be otherwise—a point Stern does not mention...
...2) Production Co-ordinator...
...Stern's failure to set forth any critical analysis fatally flaws what could have been an important book...
...The problem runs even deeper, as Oliver Wendell Holmes, later to be a Justice on the Supreme Court, knew in 1873...
...NY 14607 recommended reading, but only because it poses some of the questions that should be asked about the American legal system...
...The bar elite functions as urbane hitmen, in three-piece suits and buttoned-down collars, for those with money and power...
...The trouble with Laywers on Trial is that it does not go nearly far enough...
...Variety of responsibilities, good typing skills required...
...The legal guild will not succumb easily, however, and the talent sufficent to thwart attacks must be found...
...Thrasymachus still challenges legal scholars and those who write about law and lawyers, particularly as the Age of Scarcity draws even nearer...
...He marshals persuasive evidence for it...
...If this were successful at the polls, a chain reaction might be started...
...They do not cut to the core of the deep troubles of the constitutional order in the United States...
...plus health benefits, vacation...
...he denied that there was "an identity of interest between the different parts of a community...
...His book is a preliminary discussion to a more incisive and thoughtful analysis of the foibles of lawyers...
...Possibly some tenacious reformers could get a version of it placed as an initiative proposal on some state's ballot...
...On the level, then, of anecdotes sure to make readers' as bilious about lawyers as about doctors, Lawyers on Trial is a limited success...
...Arthurs...
...Writing about the conviction for conspiracy of labor strikers in England, Holmes said that the law itself is not neutrally derived, but favors one class over another...
...Written in a journalistic style with little analysis, Lawyers on Trial is an interpretation of that theme...
...In 1899 Veblen maintained that the legal profession was nothing more than a type of employment "immediately subservient to ownership and financiering...
...Lawyers who serve the poor or who bring public-interest lawsuits have, in the final analysis, a dual function, whether or not they realize it...
...Pay $115/wk...
...But he does not suggest how to get there from here—how, that is, to get an NLS enacted into law...
...Why is a legal system of such obvious inequity tolerated...
...Jerold Auerbach's Unequal Justice, for example, is a far better discussion of the faults and peccadilloes of lawyers...
...Even so, Stern reminds us that most Americans are ill served or not served at all by the profession...
Vol. 45 • March 1981 • No. 3
