At 1:19 PM -0400 9/13/00, Steven Furlong wrote:
Tim May wrote:
We as a culture have swung far away from "sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me" toward a culture of lawsuits. And the lawyer lobby supports and embraces this culture, getting laws passed making it easier every day to suppress speech.
For my first year of law school I'm taking Contracts, Criminal Law, Legal Writing, and Torts. The books for the first three subjects aren't too bad from a "lawyers are scum" perspective, but both of my torts books had me screaming within twenty pages.
Why in the name of all that is good and interesting would you train to become a _lawyer_? Jeesh. (From a practical standpoint, here in the Bay Area there is a growing oversupply of lawyers. According to the newspapers, modulo their biases and inaccuracies, many lawyer larvae are accepting "paralegal" positions. As with past "shortages of doctors" and "shortages of teachers," the boom-bust cycle continues. Also, there is a trend toward "corporatization" of these fields, with doctors as not-so-highly-paid-anymore employees of HMOs, for example. If the trend carried over to LMOs (Legal Maintenance Organizations), look out.)
In one, the authors argue for greatly increasing the scope of tort offenses and reducing the permissible defenses [1]. As if the US doesn't have enough frivolous and nonsensical lawsuits. In the other, on page 3 yet, the authors argue that if someone is injured such that he can no longer work, _someone_ should be held financially liable because society has lost the first person's wages [2]. That seems just half a step from saying that the people are the property of the state. Maybe I'm reading too much into poorly-phrased paragraphs, but I haven't seen anything in either book to contradict the bad impression.
All of this is why I protest so loudly when I hear people saying "But this is a lawsuit, not a government action! It's not speech suppression, just the tort process at work." (And there are some connections, which I won't go into right now, with treating journalists as some kind of special protected class, with "shield laws" and customary (pace Lessig) exemptions from lawsuits which would hit ordinary proles. There should be no such exemptions, and yet far higher standards for successfully suing. My not liking the words of NAMBLA, or Declan McCullagh, or Aryan Nations, should not be enough to get a lawsuit into a court of law.) There have been _practical_ solutions offered. "Loser pays" is the most obvious one. (With no way of avoiding the judgment. Not with bankruptcy, not with poverty. If Sally B. Frivolous files a lawsuit against J. Random Company and _loses_ and is ordered to pay court costs and damages of several million dollars, then let her mop floors for the next 60 years, paying 80% of her earnings just to keep up with the interest payments! Debtor's prisons are a good idea.) --Tim May -- ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, "Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.