Richard Reeves on Political Books
Richard Reeves on Political Books Polls in the 1974 California gubernatorial campaign indicated that Jerry Brown, the Democrat, began the contest far ahead of his Republican opponent, Houston...
...They worked out a contract that Flournoy was forced to sign if he wanted the debates, which were usually held at odd hours on public television stations in minor markets like Fresno...
...Radio broadcasts were also prohibited by "the contract...
...But then I don't come from a law school...
...The adoption of the canons of ethics in 1908," Lieberman writes, "gave to a small elite an instrument of considerable power with which to control the entire profession...
...Where I come from, that is called contempt -not of the court, but for the law...
...It Richard Reeves is the author of Convention His column is a regular feature of The Washington Monthly...
...All I can tell is that things have slipped a long way when a U.S...
...So, Flournoy, with less to lose, wanted television debates...
...The fortunes they daily acq uire in every province from the misfortunes of their are surprising...
...I'm one of those simple souls who isn't shielded by jargon and the Code of Professional Responsibility and Canons of Judicial Ethics of the American Bar Association...
...Some of that paranoia may come from living in a city, Washington, with one lawyer for every 40 citizens-and believing that the decline of a society is directly proportional to the number of lawyers therein...
...Richard Reeves on Political Books Polls in the 1974 California gubernatorial campaign indicated that Jerry Brown, the Democrat, began the contest far ahead of his Republican opponent, Houston Flournoy...
...It's possible...
...Granted, the lawyers' trickery demonstrated just how laid-back electronic journalism is in California, but it also showed, once again, how much lawyers can get away with when they intone their mumbo-jurnbo to the non-counseled...
...Norton: Crisis at the Bar: The Unethical Ethics of Lawyers and What to Do About It...
...A private ethic, based on the adversary system, that does its best to make the lawyer in power a person answerable only to a client or his fellow attorneys...
...There have been small cracks in the walls around the profession-allowing lawyers to advertise is one-but, in general, the bar has been successful in substituting its private ethic for public morality in the society...
...The contract, of course, wasn't worth the paper it was written on...
...John Crevecoeur in 1787: "Lawyers are plants that will grow in any soil that is cultivated by the hands of others, and once they have taken root they will extinguish every vegetable that grows around them...
...Not merely the lawyers' freedom, but that of all hangs in the balance...
...He called a lawyer...
...Crisis at the Bar ends where I think it ought to begin: "Unless lawyers themselves begin to make the necessary changes in their professional lives and relationships more will be lost than the right to call lawyers ethical...
...Leaving aside the obvious facts that 24 of 39 presidents of the United States and routine majorities of Congress have been lawyers, the brothers (and a few sisters) of the bar have moved into the top ranks of every important institution of the society, a trend as America has transfonned nation of producers of paperchasers and deal-makers...
...the bar] could and did use the canons of ethics, together with bar examinations, increasingly stringent educational requirements, and character committees to limit the admission of would-be advocates and to lift the practice of the rules of capitalism...
...Selfdefined ethics are not morals...
...Wrong book...
...What scares me is not the amassing power...
...Jethro K. Lieberman, an attorney himself, goes after the mumbo-jumbo and his profession in a book published this month by W.W...
...Brown didn't, but he also didn't want to appear to be afraid of confrontation...
...Senator, in this case Jacob Javits of New York, could avoid taking a stand on Watergate for two years by simply saying: "As a lawyer, it would be improper for me to comment...
...The sacred canons, according to Crisis at the Bar, were written by three fonner Confederate Army colonels in ·Alabama in 1887...
...What do you do when you want to get away with doing the opposite of what you want people to think you're doing...
...What the bar has done, as Liebennan points out in smaller, everyday examples, is to use the canons to recreate a medieval guild system in which the members of a craft control the production, conditions of entry and membership, and the price structure of their business...
...Liebennan...
...The rest of us are only left to reflect that if politics is too important to be left to politicians, things like government are too important to be left to lawo · yers...
...But before he says that, Lieberman documents that lawyers are not particularly interested in self-reform...
...When stations in Los Angeles and San Fran~ cisco wanted to broadcast segments, they were told it was forbidden by "the contract...
...In fact, he called all his lawyers...
...Right subject...
...Judging by the silence of bar associations, it is to plead his client gUilty-in this case, former Central Intelligence Director Richard Helms-then plead for mercy, outside the court and say that the conviction is a badge of honor...
...The most most bungling member of that profession, will, if placed in the most obscure part of the country, promote litigiousness and amass more wealth than the most opulent fanner with all his toil...
...Considering the chicken-and-egg problem-which came first-it is impossible for me to untangle my thoughts as to whether the rise of lawyers is primarily responsible for the decline into dealing as a replacement for real work...
...This one from Letters of an American Farmer, published by H. St...
...But it worked: the Brown-Flournoy debates were something of a media non-event...
...Javits was citing a higher morality: the bar's Canons of Ethics...
...was a private agreement binding on no one but the people who signed it...
...It is a profession, after all, that stands by when one of its most distinguished practitioners, Edward Bennett Wil ms, makes a public mockery of American jurisprudence...
...however, did bring to my attention a quote for my antilawyer me...
...Being a clever young man and a graduate of Yale Law School, Brown knew . exactly what to do when he etc., etc...
Vol. 10 • April 1978 • No. 2
