I thought about this while watching on of those insipid commercials for a local ambulance chasing law firm that does personal injuries law suits. It was about how good the attorneys feel about doing "good" for the clients. And I suppose there is joy all around...except for the dear departed, or poor Mama lying comatose in ICU...if the jury award is a few hundred thousand or more.
     But if you've been wronged, screwed or injured for less than $10,000, that same high profile firm will dump the case into the lap of a newbie intern, whose only objective is to get a settlement as fast as possible. No matter how good the case, time, not justice will be of the essence, and the indifference that now defines the profession will become visible for all to see.
     I left the profession in 1979 for that reason (I am of John Edward's generation, only a little older. My generation got worse as it went on.)
     But over the years I have taken clients who have fallen through the cracks, usually from poor representation, rebuilt their cases, and found (vetted) attorneys who could get them back into court. We've had some success and some failures but I've been able to keep my fingers in enough to see the moral chasm between lawyers and the people has widened.
     In short, there are two kinds of lawyers out there. It comes down to what they see in the mirror each morning.
First, there is the person who, because he/she delayed gratification for three years and paid a lot of money for a law degree, sees a professional who is licensed to work in a fairly exclusive field and entitled to receive better pay than an auto mechanic for that work.
     But then there is the person who, when he sees himself in the mirror, sees a member of a different class, a person apart from the rest of the community. In fact, a Levitical class, if you will. Alan Dershowitz and Laurence Tribe, for instance, have always stood for the general proposition that only those trained in law can understand the Constititution, and there must be an elect clergy that stands between the citizens and their understanding of their own freedoms. Socialists also feel this way but for slightly different reasons. Elitists feel this way and wannabe patricians and aristocrats feel this way, for even more different reasons. Many theologians feel similarly about the New Testament.
     Still others of this group, the more mercenary, believe the current constitutional set-up, with legislatures representing the people, and writing laws is too messy a process. Stan Chesley, the Cincinnati class-action lawyer, once wrote that lawyers and judges were better suited to write the laws of the land. I recall the story of a dirt-poor fellow I knew who found a million dollar antique in a barn, got rich, built a business, then spent the rest of his life trying to sell the notion that what no more than good luck was in fact shrewd business sense.
     This has also been a rising belief among American trial lawyers for some time, that they posses this same sort of magic potion. But it has also become a belief among many jurists of the Left, which explains the rather strange (if you stop to think about) symbiotic relationship between Left wing lawyer-academicians, left wing judges and pirate plaintiffs' lawyers....each thinking they hold the hole Ace.
      At this juncture of American history, each of these factions believe their idea of paternalism is best and will out in the end. But only one will, and that will be the one that will not ally itself with others or compromise its own set of principles in order to get there.

      Now for the rest of the story. Under socialism, true socialism, lawyers will run to get coffee. In the 1970s Japanese business men did business face to face without attorneys. Again, lawyers there fetched chai (tea). The US bar associations threw up such a howl that finally lawyers were admitted to the inner sanctums of Japanese business, and as expected, tried to become the central hub to things that were beyond their ken. The Japanese economy began slowly to sink into the muck from that time on. Indeed, world business has been forever sidetracked from it's two major purposes, making things well and selling things well, all because lawyers insisted on a place at the table.
      That may be about to end. If the nature of American business changes, especially if the federal government takes a major stock-holding position in US companies, or even eventually owns or directs them, trial lawyers will be SOL with regards to those entire companies, and new laws will be written to reflect that new insularity. The trial lawyers will be left to sue the beejeezus out of what also will be a dwindling small business class...for nickles and dime rather than millions.
      Oh, there will still be lawyers, of course, but mostly in government. And although they won't be wearing little Mao jackets, they will be dressed rather drably, the loose fitting tweed uniforms of scribes who tend to templates drawn by someone else. There will be no more limos, power lunches or the laying of secretaries across oak desks, for those things are all signs of station...and attorneys will no longer have that one thing. They will have fallen back to their natural place on the pecking order of human accomplishment...just below aluminum siding salesmen.
      If I write this with some glee, it's true, for this series has been as much about the fate the useful idiots of the soft left have inflicted on themselves as it has been about speculations as to how socialism will effect the spirit of freedom still beating in most Americans. The great truth is, if it takes three generations for true American-style democracy to re-emerge, and free markets are once again re-opened, American trial lawyers will not be there to see it...not by a damn site, for it will have been the judgment of history that they be taken to a nearby oak and hung until they are dead, dead, dead, those viper-tongued sons of Satan. (With thanks to Judge Roy Bean.)
BChumm