Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory
From: kwee@oracle.uucp (Karl Wee)
Subject: The over-lawyering of America
Reply-To: kwee@oracle.uucp (Karl Wee)
Organization: Oracle Corporation, Belmont, CA
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 07:04:07 GMT
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From: wdstarr@athena.mit.edu (William December Starr):

>....there's a standard piece of "conventional wisdom" going
>around these days that the United States has too many lawyers, is too

I think this "conventional wisdom" exists for some reasons.  Our system
of law which dictates our behavior has become far too cumbersome.
It has grown to this big mass because we have too often let
special interest control the govt or manipulate jurie, or tried to "reach
down" and take care of those who get into disasters because of their own
clearly irresponsible behavior.  This is done at the expense of either
the entire society, with everyone sharing a little bit of pain, or
of somebody rich (deep pockets).  It would be OK, even compassionate,
to do this once in a while.  However we've made a pattern of it and
it has become a vicious cycle where people have no incentives to do
their part to avoid disasters (or not to join special interests).

Society has paid every time a user of a product doesn't follow instructions,
gets hurt, and sues the factory for product liability.  We have paid every
time a worker gets huge workman's compensation payments because he didn't
follow instructions and got hurt.  (I heard the actual total cost of
each blue collar worker to the employer is 170-200% of his salary, if you
add up all the insurance.  So much for U.S. competitiveness.)  Society
pays each time a job-creating idea is scrapped because the legal environment
is too uncertain.  It is uncertain because the system of laws
has too many special cases, exceptions, etc. which have been created in the
past by judges and legislators who tried to help special interests and people
who failed their responsibilities.

We don't think about the absurdity that the outcome of any trial
should depend on how good your lawyer is.  Note that an overly cumbersome
system of rules is AS GOOD AS IF THERE WERE NO RULES.  It is the law of
the jungle where special knowledge of arbitrary rules replaces the muscle
as the force that creates unproductive competition and takes away the
incentive to produce anything useful.

The only solution is for society to work together and proactively toward
a clearly defined standard of responsibilities.  If you really think about
it, we're so much more the same than we're different that it's really not
that hard to do.  What we really want our society to be is much simpler
than what has been written in the books.

What it takes for this system to work is for everybody to carry out his
responsibilities.  There'll be plenty of incentives to do so.  In fact it
can be argued that SIMPLIFYING, not COMPLICATING the rules of behavior
is what being civilized is all about.

We have allowed this complication to happen
because of our lack of vigilence.  We have been able to afford it,
but it has piled up to a level that we can't afford.

>litiginous (is that a word?) a society, etc.  Underlying this is the
>popular view of lawyers as parasites without whom things would be a
>lot better.  I have to question this, though...

Lawyers should have been the first ones to see that an overly cumbersome
system won't work.  They have not, as a group, been outspoken about it
because their livelihood depends on it.

>....the more I learn of the law and of our society the more I
>see legal service suppliers as being somewhat analogous to medical
>service suppliers -- just as we will probably always have injuries,
>diseases etc and therefore will always need people who by skill and
>training are specially able to help deal with them, so, I suspect,
>will we always have conflicts between people regarding their rights,
>duties, privileges etc in an organized society and therefore we will
>also always need people who by skill and training are specially able
>to help people deal with those issues.

Even if society was smart, I don't doubt that there'd be a place
for a certain (small) amount of lawyering.  However, in that
case we would make the interface between lawyers and their clients so
clearly defined that lawyers'd do nothing more than routine information
retrieval work whose results could be relied upon for consitency.

Then we'll have resolved the FUNDAMENTAL contradiction that while
we're 99% ignorant of our laws while making split-second decisions on
behavior, such ignorance is no defence in court.
Newsgroups: talk.politics.theory