Time: Fri Sep 19 23:44:31 1997
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Date: Fri, 19 Sep 1997 22:09:10 -0700
To: (Recipient list suppressed)
From: Paul Andrew Mitchell [address in tool bar]
Subject: SLS: Woe unto you Lawyers
<snip>
>
> Something you knew along!!!
>
> The first thing we do, lets kill all the lawyers
> (King Henry the Sixth, IV, ii 86)
>
> Woe unto you Lawyers
> (Luke 11:52)
>
> LAWYERS
>
> ...There was another point which a little
> perplexed him at present. I had said, that some
> of our crew left their country on account of
> being ruined by law; but he was at a loss how it
> should come to pass, that the law which was
> intended for every man's preservation, should be
> any man's ruin. Therefore he desired to be
> further satisfied what I meant by law, and the
> dispensers thereof.....
>
> I assured his Honour, that law was a science
> wherein I had not much conversed ..... however,
> I would give him all the satisfaction I was able.
>
> There was a society of men among us, bred up from
> their youth in the art of proving by words
> multiplied for the purpose, that white is black,
> and black is white, according as they are paid.
> To this society all the rest of the people are
> slaves. For example, if my neighbor hath a mind
> to my cow, he hires a lawyer to prove that he
> ought to have my cow from me. I must then hire
> another to defend my right, it being against all
> rules of law that any man should be allowed to
> speak for himself.
>
> Now in this case I am the right owner lie under
> two great disadvantages. First, my lawyer,
> being practiced almost from his cradle in
> defending falsehood, is quite out of his element
> when he would be an advocate for justice, which
> as an office unnatural, he always attempts with
> ill-will.
>
> The second disadvantage is that my lawyer must
> proceed with great caution, or else he will be
> reprimanded by the judges, and abhorred by his
> brethren, as one that would lessen the practice
> of the law. And therefore I have but two methods
> to preserve my cow. The first is to gain over my
> adversary's lawyer with a double fee, who will
> then betray his client by insinuating that he
> hath justice on his side. The second way is for
> my lawyer to make my cause appear as unjust as he
> can, by allowing the cow to belong to my
> adversary; and this, if it be skillfully done,
> will go a great way towards obtaining a favorable
> verdict; it having been found, from a careful
> observation of issues and events, that the wrong
> side, under the management of such practitioners,
> has the fairer chance for success.
>
> Now, your Honour is to know that these judges are
> persons appointed to decide all controversies of
> property, as well as for the trial of criminals,
> and are picked out from the most dexterous
> lawyers, who are grown old or lazy. And having
> been biased all their lives against truth and
> equity, are under such a fatal necessity of
> favoring fraud, perjury, and oppression, that I
> have known several of them to refuse a large
> bribe from the side of where justice lay, rather
> than injure the facility, by doing anything
> unbecoming their nature or their office.
>
> It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever
> hath been done before may legally be done again;
> and therefore they take special care to record
> all the decisions formerly made against common
> justice and the general reason of mankind. These,
> under the name of "precedents", they produce as
> authorities, to justify the most iniquitous; and
> the judges never fail of directing accordingly.
>
> In pleading they studiously avoid entering into
> the merits of the cause, but are loud, violent,
> and tedious in dwelling upon all circumstances
> which are not to the purpose. For instance, in
> the case already mentioned, they never desire to
> know what claim or title my adversary hath to my
> cow; but whether the said cow were red or black,
> her horns long or short, whether she was milked
> at home or abroad, and the like; after which they
> consult precedents, adjourn the cause from time
> to time and in ten, twenty, or thirty years come
> to an issue.
>
> It is likewise to be observed, that this society
> hath a peculiar cant and jargon of their own,
> that no other mortal can understand, and wherein
> all their laws are written, whereby they have
> wholly con- founded the very essence of truth and
> falsehood.
>
> In the trial of persons accused for crimes
> against the state the method is much more short
> and commendable; the judge first sends to sound
> the disposition of those in power, after which he
> can easily hang or save the criminal strictly
> preserving all due forms of law.
>
> Here my master interposed, saying it was a pity
> that creatures endowed with such prodigious
> abilities of mind were not rather encouraged to
> be instructors of others in wisdom and knowledge.
> In answer I assured him that in all points out of
> their trade, they were the most ignorant and
> stupid generations among us, and equally disposed
> to pervert the general reason of mankind in every
> other subject of discourse as in that of
> their own profession.
> GULLIVER'S TRAVELS, Part IV; Chapter V; 1735
> --- Jonathan Swift
>
> MODERN DAY COMMENT ON LAWYERS
>
> For every age, a group of bright boys, learned in
> their trade and jealous of their learning who
> blend technical competence with plain and fancy
> hocus-pocus to make themselves masters of their
> fellowman...
>
> We cannot die and leave our property to our
> children without calling on the lawyers to guide
> us through a maze of confusing gestures and
> formalities that lawyers have created. Why should
> not a man who wants to leave his property to his
> wife at the death say in his will, "I will
> everything I own to go to my wife when I die",
> instead of having to hire a lawyer and go through
> a long rigmarole of legal language? It is through
> the medium of their weird and wordy mental
> gymnastics that the lawyers lay down the rules
> under which we live. And it is only because the
> average man cannot play their game, and so cannot
> see for himself how instrinsically empty of
> meaning their playthings are, that the lawyers
> continue to get away with it. The legal trade, in
> short, is nothing but a high class racket...
>
> If the ordinary man could see in black and white
> how silly and irrelevant and unnecessary it all
> is, he might be persuaded, in a peaceful way, to
> take control of his civilization out of the hands
> of these modern purveyors of streamlined voodoo
> and chromium-plated theology, the lawyers.
> Fred Rodell (Professor
> - Yale Law School)
>
>
> THE REST OF THE STORY
>
> If there is a stain on the record of our
> forefathers, a dark hour in the earliest history
> of the American colonies, it would be the hanging
> of the so-called "witches" at Salem.
>
> But that was a pinpoint in place and time - a
> brief lapse of hysteria. For the most part, our
> seventeenth-century colonists were scrupulously
> fair, even in fear.
>
> There was one group they feared with reason - a
> society, you might say, whose often insidious
> craft had claimed a multitude of victims, ever
> since the Middle Ages in Europe.
>
> One group of people were hated and feared from
> Massachusetts to Virginia. The magistrates would
> not burn them at the stake, although surely a
> great many of the colonists might have
> recommended such a solution. Our forefathers were
> baffled by them.
>
> In the first place, where did they come from? Of
> all who sailed from England to Plymouth in 1620,
> not one of those two-legged vermin was abroad.
> "Vermin." That's what the colonist called them.
> Parasites who fed on human misery, spreading
> sorrow and confusion wherever they went.
> "Destructive," they were called.
>
> And still they were permitted coexistence with
> the colonists. For a while, anyway. Of course,
> there were colonial laws prohibiting the practice
> of their infamous craft. Somehow a way was always
> found around those laws.
>
> In 1641, Massachusetts Bay colony took a novel
> approach to the problem. The governors attempted
> to starve those "devils" out of existence through
> economic exclusion. They were denied wages, and
> thereby it was hoped that they would perish.
>
> Four years later, Virginia followed the example
> of Massachusetts Bay, and for a while it seemed
> that the dilemma had been resolved.
>
> It had not. Somehow, the parasites managed to
> survive, and the mere nearness of them made the
> colonists' skin crawl.
>
> In 1658 in Virginia the final solution:
> Banishment. Exile. The "treacherous one" were
> cast out of the colony. At last, after decades
> of enduring the psychological gloom, the sun came
> out and the birds sang and all was right with the
> world. And the elation continue for a generation.
>
> I'm not sure why the Virginians eventually
> allowed the outcasts to return, but they did. In
> 1680, after twenty-two years, they despised ones
> were readmitted to the colony on the condition
> they be subjected to the strictest surveillance.
>
> How soon we forget!
>
> For indeed, over the next half-century or so, the
> imposed restrictions were slowly, quietly swept
> away. And those whose treachery had been feared
> since the Middle Ages ultimately took their place
> in society.
>
> You see, the "vermin" that once infested colonial
> America, the parasites who preyed on the
> misfortune of their neighbors until finally they
> were officially banished from Virginia, those
> dreaded, despised, outcast masters of confusion
> were lawyers. (from paul Harvey's THE REST OF
> THE STORY)
>
>
>
> CONCERNING LAWYERS
>
> I think we may class the lawyer in the natural
> history of monsters. (John Keats)
>
> Enemies to all knowledge and learning. (Jonathan
> Swift)
>
> One who helps you get what's coming to him
> (Anon).
>
> A liar with a permit to practice (Anon)
>
> Woe to those who enact evil statutes, and to
> those who constantly record unjust decisions, so
> as to deprive the needy of justice, and rob the
> poor of My people of their rights...Now what will
> you do in the day of punishment, and in the
> devastation which will come from afar? To whom
> will you flee for help? And where will you leave
> your wealth? (Isaiah, Chapter 10, ver. 1-3)
>
<snip>
========================================================================
Paul Andrew Mitchell : Counselor at Law, federal witness
B.A., Political Science, UCLA; M.S., Public Administration, U.C. Irvine
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