CDR: Re: And you thought Nazi agitprop was controversial?

[Tim May]

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
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