Damned Lawyers

Damned lawyers! (Commonly thought of as a redundancy.)

Lawyers are those people who have made a habit of feeding off of other peoples' inability to know all the laws that relate to them. They're also responsible for making it so that even if someone -does- know the law, they can't practice it for themselves, they still need a lawyer to file all the paperwork for them because in order to do so, you must file directly with the clerk of the court in question... and also, you run the risk of being charged with practicing law when you're not a member of the Bar.

-- MathewButler

That's true of many other professions, as well. At any rate; if you represent yourself, you're not likely to be charged with practicing law without a license. If you represent someone else, OTOH...

It appears to me that lawyers are just people whose PatternLanguage consists of laws.

Here in the United States, one can handle one's own legal filings. Many people do this for relatively cut-and-dried affairs such as uncontested divorces and straightforward bankruptcies. There are various businesses that operate in a sort of grey area to help you fill out the forms. This varies from state to state - in Texas publishers of books on how to do your own divorce, etc., are threatened as practicing law without a license. In California paralegal services will fill out the forms for you and you just go down to the courthouse. I wouldn't recommend doing this for anything complicated.

Things have gone so bad that in some countries mediation is compulsory before a divorce. Legislators want to get divorce away from the legal arena as much as possible. They know very well lawyers have gone too far!

I wouldn't count on that. What do you think legislators used to do before they got into politics? Most of them were lawyers. -- MikeSmith

But once they're legislators, their motivations change somewhat; they don't get paid by the law passed, or by the trouble they cause.

Of course, there's a revolving door. Many lawyers become legislators, and then return to becoming lawyers or lobbyists specializing in the laws they passed while they were legislators. This does provide lawyers an incentive to get more laws passed, since the more nooks and crannies there are in the law, the more scope there will be for specialized legal and legislative work. RohitPatnaik?

Q: What's the difference between a catfish and lawyer?

A: The catfish knows it's a scum-sucking bottom-feeder.

CategoryLegal