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Do we have too many lawyers?  

During the Supreme Court hearing of the Grants Pass, Oregon, anti-camping case involving the homeless sleeping in public parks, other public facilities and vehicles, Chief Justice John Roberts asked the Biden administration lawyer: “Why would you think these nine people are the best people to judge and weigh those policy judgments?”

I have an answer for him. It has become the Supreme Court’s responsibility because it decided that corporations were people, that funding of political campaigns should not be limited, that billionaires should have a lower rate of taxation than hotel maids, taxi drivers and plumbers, that voting rights of people in former Confederate states no longer needed federal protection, and that it was perfectly legal for corporations and billionaires to stash obscene profits in intrastate tax havens and in tiny islands scattered around the globe.

The Republican Supreme Court is directly responsible for the increased costs of housing and the failure of the economy for the “common good.” We now have 550 cities in the Divided States of America where it takes more than $1 million to buy a starter home!  

Supreme Court decisions in the last two decades have created the worst economic inequality among wealthy nations. Perhaps we should ban lawyers from the Supreme Court. When countries large and small get into a heap of trouble, the usual response to problems is often Shakespeare’s famous quote from his historical play Henry VI: “The first thing to do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” 

We will all be probably using this quote as the cases against Donald J. Trump gallop and careen through various lawyers, judges and courts and the homeless will have the freedom to sleep and live any damn place they want to. Michael Cohen, Trump’s “lawyer-fixer,” will testify against his former employer who thought he was loyal until he found out Cohen was going to testify against him in the “hush money” court. Then Cohen was a “serial liar, rat, felon and sleazebag.”  

We have one lawyer for 246 people, China one for 4,620

Jasmine Cameron in her op-ed “Lawyers Under Threat: Highlighting Their Plight” cites why we have one lawyer for 246 citizens and China has 4,620. Is it lawyers who are spreading populism and authoritarianism around the world? Read this paragraph and see if you agree with her: “Rising population and increasing authoritarianism are repressing civil society organizations and activists globally and eroding respect for the rule of law. Antidemocratic practices are spreading in all regions of the world. One of the tools authoritarian governments now use with greater frequency to restrict and pressure members of civil society and opposition figures is to target the lawyers who represent them in the legal system. The rationale behind this tactic is simple – opponents of autocrats often succeed in pressing their cases in a judicial system, but once a regime manages to sideline principled attorneys – not to mention independent judges themselves – and stacks its official and private-sector institutions with government-controlled 'pocket' lawyers instead, access to legitimate representation dwindles and rule of law becomes fundamentally compromised.”

It is absolutely fascinating to me that Donald Trump’s famous fixer Michael Cohen made this statement in 2011 describing his work for the famous psychopath-apprentice: “If somebody does something Mr. Trump doesn’t like, I do everything in my power to resolve it to Mr. Trump’s benefit. If you do something wrong. I’m going to come at you, grab you by the neck, and I’m not going to let you go until I’m finished.”

It’s why “Fixer” Cohen ended up with a three-year jail term for bank fraud, tax evasion and lots of other legal sins. He was also in charge of the Trump casinos in Atlantic City that eventually went bankrupt. He was appointed by Trump to the position of Special Counsel and Executive Vice-President of the Trump Organization because he demonstrated a fierce loyalty while collecting a paycheck.

But now as the “hush money trial” is in session in New York City regarding secret payments to a porn star and a Playboy “entertainer” who “made the beast with two backs” (a favorite descriptive sexual term used by Shakespeare!) with Trump while Melania nursed their son Barron, he has become an important witness to the transgressions of a malignant narcissist.  

Shakespeare wrote about lawyers because he also knew many fixers

The world’s leading playwright became a wealthy man because he was granted a Royal Patent by James 1 and had private and business deals all over London and Stratford. In his play Hamlet, he had the lead character fondle a skull found in an old grave site: “Why, may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddities now, his quillities, his cases, his tenures and his tricks? Why does he suffer this mad knave (the sexton) now to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel?”

In King John Constance says to Cardinal Pandulph: “When law can do no right, let it be lawful that law bar no wrong. Law cannot give my child his kingdom here, for he that holds his kingdom holds the law.”

In Measure for Measure Angelo says to Escalus: “We must not make a scarecrow of the law, setting it up to fear the birds of prey. And let it keep one shape, till custom makes their perch and not their terror.”

In Timon of Athens Alcibiades says: “For pity is the virtue of the law and none but tyrants use it cruelly.” Some have said Shakespeare wrote the most famous quote about laws. A

ctually, it was in Oliver Twist written by Charles Dickens: “The law is a ass – a idiot. If that’s the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor.”

My favorite quote about the law – and most realistic – was by Clarence Darrow of Chicago, who became famous by being the defense lawyer in the Scopes trial, the Tennessee battle in 1925 between religion and teaching about evolution as promoted by Charles Darwin. Spencer Tracy played Darrow in Inherit the Wind, a movie about the trial. The movie has great scenes about how laws “modify” societies. I think Darrow described 99% of us when he later mused: “All men have an emotion to kill, when they strongly dislike someone they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed anyone, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.”

Darrow was a staunch defender of workers’ rights and was also a formidable criminal defense attorney. A fictional lawyer named Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s novel To Kill A Mockingbird has attracted many to a law career. One is South Carolina personal injury lawyer Mark Chappel, who got this from Atticus: “I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway, and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.”  

My exposure to laws and lawyers

I made it through my juvenile years rather well. Had one close while stealing watermelons from a truck garden with a couple of friends. Escaped by being in better physical condition than the cops chasing us. I got acquainted with laws while in the Marine Corps when my CO saw I was a teacher’s college graduate, so I was assigned to teach the company Geneva Conventions and a number of international treaties each year regarding war crimes.

According to law, we had to teach the troops what constituted war crimes and what didn’t. I still keep track of war crimes, and if there is a country in the Middle East with a leader who is not guilty of war crimes, please let me know. George W. Bush is guilty of war crimes because he accepted opinions of government lawyers who wrote that torture was not a war crime until the prisoner was close to death. Dick Cheney committed a war crime when he said waterboarding was not a war crime. It was declared a war crime in the Spanish-American War! We should have waterboarded him on the steps of the capitol while asking him whether it was a war crime.

Our prison at Guantanamo Bay is the site of many war crimes by CIA and government psychologists. I spent one day in an LST anchored in the harbor. It is a beautiful spot now ruined by a horrible history. Keeping the torture rooms open is a permanent blot on our history.

When I was assigned a six-month tour in Cuba and the Caribbean, I took a correspondence course in general law from the De LaSalle University of Chicago to have something to do during the long nights in a tent. Also, I was assigned to be a junior member of a special court martial board of five members who judged “misdemeanors” committed by Marines. We handled stuff that a city or county court would handle in civilian life. “Felonies” were handled by general court martial boards led by someone from the Navy Judge Advocate Office.

Later, as a teacher and administrator, I worked with lawyers each year because I represented teachers and employees of the school district as an administrator during 28 years of salary and benefit negotiations. I was chief spokesman for the Fargo School Board for 11 of those years. After retirement, I was elected to the school board and was still stuck on the negotiations committee! After all those years at the bargaining table, head negotiators always say: “The only friend I have left is the person directly across the table!”  

How did “America’s Mayor” end up Trump’s shyster bottom feeder?

Whatever happened to lawyer Rudy Guiliani, who seemed to be a New Yorker moving to the top in a robust society? At one time he was a moderate Republican who supported abortion rights, gay rights and limited gun control. As a lawyer he defended the homeless and the billionaire.

Some say as a federal prosecutor he helped to “clean up crime and make New York City safer.” He ran for senator and president. After 9/11 he basked in the sunshine by being called “America’s Mayor” although he had problems in his personal life.

However, after his political losses, he fell into deep depression, fled to Florida and was provided a bungalow by fellow New Yorker Donald Trump, who was escaping taxes and the truth at his Mar-a-Loco estate. Evidently, he was not vaccinated for the Trump loyalty virus. He did a swan dive into Trump’s campaign, thinking if he helped Trump win the presidency, he would be rewarded with a major cabinet post or, maybe, ATTORNEY GENERAL.

Alas, Trump had other plans. Rudy was his snarling attack dog. Now, Rudy at 79 is using black hair dye, lying his way to bankruptcy, homelessness, disbarment and another dose of deadly depression. He has fallen on the sword of his tongue he sharpened in law school.

Are we in difficulty today because often, of the 535 people in Congress, more  than 315 were lawyers? R.R. Martin has said: “Politicians are mostly people who have had too little morals and ethics to be lawyers.”