Start by improving your unjust behaviors, your tyranny, your plundering, your self-dealt privileges of George III, your utter failure to deliver a single goal of a single subject in the law. Stop your supernatural garbage core doctrines. Stop your hijacking of the law with procedure and incomprehensible English, requiring the hiring of the lawyer for all transactions. Stop your protecting the criminal and destroying the crime victim. Your profession is a waking nightmare for this nation.

The lawyer is in utter failure, with one exception. Rent seeking.

I agree that all the name calling is a distraction but it exists all around the board, from attorneys who scream "bad faith" any time an insurance company insists on denying non-covered claims, to plaintiff, civil defense and criminal defense attorneys who routinely malign the character of the opposition, to sites like this one that routinely malign any and all attempts at tort reform.

The answer to improving the imagine of attorneys is very simple. Attorneys must behave ethically at all times and remember that as "Officers of the Court" a duty is owed to all, not just the clients' best interests.

Most importantly savage disciplinary action should be taken against all attorneys who violate their duties as "Officers of the Court". Any attorney can file a frivilous suit against me forcing me to expend much time and money getting the suit dismissed. In exchange for that power and privilege should come responsibility.

The Bar should not be self-regulating unless willing to concede that all other professions should be self-regulating, a concession no attorney would ever make. Too many states impose complete secrecy on bar discipline. This is WRONG, WWRONG, WRONG

These are simple steps but until they are taken, the legal profession deserves whatever scorn and ridicule is heaped upon them

To say that the legal profession deserves scorn and ridicule because of the rare bad actor who gets big press because people want to hear about scandal, is just far too simple and a little naive. Of course there are bad apples in the profession, as there are in every profession. But in the legal profession the few bad actors have been used as poster children for tort reform. I agree w/ Paul, people who abuse their position should be disciplined. But all the hype about greedy lawyers has a long history steeped in complicated political relations and interests so it's not as cut and dry as exposing the bad guys. Getting caught up in that hype distracts us from the real focus and the fact that lawyers would be out of the job if people fulfilled their contractual obligations and their duty of care to other people. The way folks talk about the plaintiff's bar and public interest lawyers, you'd forget that they are defending people against the consequences of unethical decisionmaking by corporate bodies.

The interesting thing about lawyer jokes is that they simply recycle old racist jokes.

Take 80% of the lawyer jokes you know, and replace "lawyer" with a race... it works (as well as a racist joke can ever work).

Kia: You decry a few bad apples ruining the image of the profession.

I decry the entire content of your work, the core doctrines from Scholasticism, their lawlessness in this secular nation. Worst of all? The rule of law is an essential utility product. If it were electricity, it would flicker on and off two hours a day in rich areas, two minutes a day in poor ones.

Your profession is in utter failure, across the board. lawyer control statutes must be enacted to exclude anyone who has passed 1L from all benches, legislative seats, all policy positions in the Executive branch. Statutes now exclude the felon, a far less damaging catastrophe if a criminal acquires a position of responsibility.

QC--that's so interesting. I was just reading Stephanie Mencimer's book, which says hostility against lawyers and hostility against Jews and non-Anglo immigrants were often one in the same in the early 1900s. At the time these groups were effectively shut out of practice at elite law firms (WASP privilege, I guess), so they worked as personal injury lawyers on contingency fees. A lot of the hostility came from their ability to thrive despite being excluded, but the ethnic prejudice going on was pretty clear.

SC--So long as we're operating under the rule of law, we need lawyers who are willing to infiltrate the legal system and provide a sober critique of its shortcomings, but who also recognize the tremendous benefits and protections it yields. I have a lot of critiques about the development of American legal doctrine and its use to subordinate and oppress less advantaged groups. As a person of color and as someone who strives to be progressive and think critically about the role of law in our society, I would be remiss if I didn't recognize this. But I also acknowledge the value of both the law and the legal profession. Many advancements have been made, thanks in large part to the lawyers fighting for them, folks who over the past centuries have worked to shape the law into a tool for social improvement.

Supremacy Claus is such a troll.

If you changed lawyer to jew in his rants he'd be identical to Hitler (and Hitler wanted to eliminate lawyers and fair trials....he was successful and there was no stopping the trains to the concentration camps).

I treat my clients fairly and never forget that we are in position to make the world a better place one case at a time. I don't take my ethics from a rulebook, but from my religion.

Steve: If you are not Jewish, the comparison to the treatment of the Jews is pretty offensive to the memory of the Holocaust. I cannot dignify you with a reply.

One points out that legal realism and the Nazi judiciary were both spawns of the Free Law Movement. They felt constrained by the writing, and decided to throw off their shackles to freely impose their wills on the public. Freely and lawlessly, here and in Germany.

If you are a Jewish lawyer, explain a mystery. You are over-represented in the lawyer profession and in lawyer academia. How come Jews accept core doctrines from Scholasticism without a word of protest? Scholasticism had the intellectual veneer of St. Thomas Aquinas. The persuasion, business end of Scholasticism was the Inquisition. Edward I whose law we practice here nearly unchanged, invented the forced wearing of yellow Stars of David whenever Jews went outside. He repaid his debts by killing 100's of his Jewish creditors, settling his "mortgage." He then passed a law banning Jews from England that stood until the Restoration 400 years ago. His portrait hangs in a gallery of great law givers in the House of Representatives. You OK with that? The House of the US, not of Nazi Germany.

Then Jewish lawyers adopt the methods of the Inquisition. Do you know which Jews they went after, and burned at the stake? The rich ones. That's right, the Inquisition was a good business, for the legalized taking of Jewish property. One has to note the similarity of methodology and choice of targets of the lawyer. As soon as any entity makes money, the land pirates come around.

If you are Jewish, I want you to explain your forbearance for these lawyer horrors. The lawyers are the Inquisitors, and all productive elements of our economy are the Jews of Medieval Europe, being hunted down.

Explain your collaboration with the oppressor, if you are a Jew.

Not like you care SC but my family was in the holocaust - most of them were killed and I don't think that Steve said anything wrong at all. SC writes "You" (as in Jews) "are over-represented in the lawyer profession and in lawyer academia." and he asks why.

Its because we advocate on behalf of those who have been disempowered. That's a pretty core principle of the religion. You fight for people who can't fight for themselves. And that means when people get harmed by corporations who think they can get away with murder.

When I live down the block from a toxic oil spill that's caused a cancer cluster (hello Greenpoint) than I am being endangered by a reckless Corporation. Not by the big, bad, scary, going to steal my tax dollars, boogy-man government but by a Corporation who finds it cheaper to buy ads pandering to environmental concerns than actually cleaning up the oilspill they dumped in my neighborhood decades ago. The only lawyers causing a problem there are the ones advising Exxon to delay and deny responsibility and clean up.
Not the lawyers fighting on behalf of community members in a class action suit. Is Exxon going to go out of business if it cleans up its own mess? Hardly.

Ok you can go back to trolling and making weird accusations again now SC but leave my religion out of it.

Kia: As a woman, as black folk, you are not getting off easily, either.

You have to explain your collaboration with the lawyer and the party of the lawyer, the Democrat Party. Every perfidy, every genocidal rampage, every oppression of your group came at the hand of the legal profession.

If you argue that was the past, you have to explain the lawyer's allowing a 7 fold higher murder victimization rate of black folk, eclipsing the deaths from lynching by several orders of magnitude. Forget the excessive murder rate. How about the excessive late term abortion rate that eradicated millions of viable black babies with Fifth Amendment protection, thanks to the lawyer.

Your indoctrination has been so good, you defend these cult criminals without the slightest self-consciousness.

Steve: How are ad hominem attacks and comparisons of debate opponents to Nazis in any way devout in your unspecified religion, lawyerly, or persuasive?

Elena: Comparing loving criticism of the wayward lawyer profession to genocidal extermination of a people is not appropriate. This sacrilegious, over-reacting, entitled lawyer, Steve feels above criticism.

If you are not a lawyer, I would appreciate your reaction to the profession's adoption wholesale of Scholasticist core doctrines, from 1250 AD, generated by rabid anti-female, anti-Semitic, mass murderers of Jews, and plunderers of Jewish property. Stop your collaboration with the rabid anti-Semites. By the way, modern law textbooks continue to use the word, "usury." What is that code for? You got it, "usury" is code for "Jew." Little has changed from 1250 AD, for the spawn of these rabid anti-Semites and mass murderers.

You heard of Spanish oppression of the Jews. Spain apologized, and sought to help the Jews in modern times. I still await an apology from England for its mass slaughter and laws expelling the Jews immediately.

What do you think of the portrait in the "great law givers" gallery of the US House of Reps, of Edward I, accurately depicted in Braveheart, as Longshanks? He was not even English. He was a French twit and oppressor. He may have killed 100's of Jews. He killed 100's of 1000's of Anglo-Saxon, freedom loving native peoples.

Who taught the lawyer all that proceduralism and nitpicking gotcha, so they could seek the rent? His idiots, the French.

LOL, I love Supremecy Claus. I really do. Pure comedy.

QC: The idea of mind reading, future forecasting, and standards of conduct set by fictional characters would be farcical. Your profession is ridiculous. You are so dim, you accepted these during your indoctrination. Funniest of all? You still do not know you underwent an indoctrination to make you swallow this Medieval garbage.

The only problem is that buffoon profession controls the three branches of government. It imposes its garbage doctrines with Army Airborne.

Seeing your lawless hierarchy swing from the trees behind a federal courthouse, now that will be funny.

Maybe, after reading Supremacy Claus, I should change my name.

And surely, after hurling the apparent(to him anyway)epithet "Democrat Party", he's not one of those Mark Foley fascists is he?

I'm guessing he is.

We need more lawyers not less----and I'm not a lawyer.

Supremacy Claus writes: "Kia: As a woman, as black folk, you are not getting off easily, either...You have to explain your collaboration with the lawyer and the party of the lawyer, the Democrat Party. Every perfidy, every genocidal rampage, every oppression of your group came at the hand of the legal profession."

SC: As a woman or as a black person I don't "have" to explain anything and am not concerned with "getting off easily." Come on, you know I'm not into that! And I do not feel remotely inclined to defend my allegiance to any identity group, or to prove my "authenticity." Besides, Condi is a black woman and I certainly wouldn't want her explaining anything on my behalf on the basis of that alone.

Instead, I'll say this: blame the lawyer for helping create the laws, for interpreting the laws, for seeking to change the laws, and for seeking to maintain the status quo. But that's the kind of tunnel vision that fuels unproductive dialogue.

Kia: I am curious. You specialized in a field of studies at a top school in the country. Did you ever come across any criticism of the role of the lawyer or of the Democrat Party during your studies?

Who founded the KKK? Who ran it for decades? Whose party were they the terror arm, the Al Aqsa Brigade of which party? Were you told, those lynchings of middle class black achievers, included the seizure their assets? Who gave the night riders legal immunity and profited from it?

I have. I've also come across criticism of the role of the judge, of the politician, and of the businessman, and of the Republican Party. I am in agreement with some of these critiques and I disagree with others.

This discussion is peripheral to the main topic though. As you know, lawyers fall across the political spectrum and party politics have evolved significantly since the founding of the KKK. I guess that's what I meant by calling the demonization of lawyers and the legal system a "distracting attack."

I disagree. This is a core dispute, and the prime cause of all social problems. I doubt you heard this at Stanford, a biased, left ideologue indoctrination camp.

Behind every racial disparity, every social affliction, every outrageous failure of social infrastructure is a lawyer making money. The lawyer loves the criminal. The lawyer hates the crime victim. Why? No fees. Reverse the SC decision saying the police have no duties to victims, the lawyer will love the victim and sue the city. Crime victimization statistical disparities will drop.

The Stanford comment is funny given the presence of the Hoover Institution right in the middle of campus.

At Stanford, the Hoover Institute is similar to a hardened, encased cyst, walled from the Stanford body, to prevent the possibility of any contamination of the left ideologue indoctrination by a fact.

SC-

I come back to see if you are still here ranting and raving and find that I am responsible for a millenia of mayhem according to your twisted historical worldview.

If it makes you feel any better I am Scot-Irish and have been fighting guys like Longshanks for my entire ancestry. In fact, my Cherokee forebears even sued "Old Hickory" and won. Sadly, the U.S. Government at that time ran according to your political leanings and our tribe was marched west on the Trail of Tears in direct violation of the law.

I am disturbed by your mania in advocating for the lynching of all lawyers. You seem to have much in common with the "mad monk" Savonarola and his "bonfire of the vanities" in Renaissance Florence. I sincerely doubt that you would fight to protect his victims, or those of the inquisition, or Longshanks, or modern-day wrongdoers. Like a great many of my clients, you never think you will need a lawyer so you claim they are unneccessary. Then you will be wrongfully accused of a crime, or your insurance company will wrongfully deny your health insurance benefits, or you will be injured by someone else's negligence.

And when it happens to you, only then will you see how wrong you are.

Steve: You have to read better. The entire meaning flew over your head, and the understood the opposite of what is happening.

I love the lawyer. I feel the rule of law is an essential utility product. I am here to correct the total screw-up of your profession. Bright minds have been destroyed by your criminal cult indoctrination. When I liberate you, you will thank me for rescuing you from your cult subjugation. The ordinary lawyer is as oppressed by the hierarchy as the public. I count you among them. I calculate only 10,000 summary executions after brief trials for insurrection against the Constitution should do it. There will only be substance in evidence, at those trials, no lawyer gotcha or infractions of collateral rules. Only excerpts of appellate decisions will be read out loud, then the verdict, and the sentences. The Deans of the law school follow for their cult indoctrination crimes against humanity.

You now have central doctrines that are supernatural and violate the Constitution. You are in utter failure in every self-stated goal of every law subject. You are mired in Medieval garbage on every page of every statute book.

Also, there will be only half of the lawyers as there are now. Your salary will be triple. Most importantly, your new competence will bring untold increases in public esteem.

You have been made stupid by your cult indoctrination. You fail to recognize the savior of the legal profession. You disrespect him with unpersuasive, shameful, ad hominem personal attacks. These only prove your frustration in the traverse upon traverse.

Steve: Thank a lawyer for the Trail of Tears. If the Jewish lawyer is a self-hating Jew for the blind support of the anti-semite, criminal cult enterprise, then you are a self-hating Cherokee for the same reason. If Longshanks killed hundreds of Jews, he killed hundreds of thousands of Scot-Irish, freedom loving people. Stop your stupid, self-hating, blind, oblivious, indoctrinated collaboration with the mass murderers of your people on both sides of the Atlantic.

Unlike your clients, I understand I need a lawyer for every major transaction. That is because the hierarchy controls the three branches of government. It has rigged it that way to enrich and empower the cult, by the methods taught to them by the French, 800 years ago. It is the most powerful, most enduring Mafia in history. It makes 99% of the policy decisions of the US government, in brazen violation of the Constitution. What other criminal organization has ever achieved that much infiltration and control of the government of a world power?

Steve: I thought about your background. Mutual bashing is a lot of fun. But, how would you like to do something really cool in the law? It may give you national prominence, and serve to increase referrals.

The portrait of Longshanks hangs in the House of Rep gallery among the great law givers.

How would you like to do whatever it takes to get it moved to the Holocaust Museum. It could serve as the nidus of an exhibit on the origins of anti-semitism in Medieval Europe, as murderous in intent and animus as any that followed.

If it can be a multi-cultural movement, I can probably approach Jewish lawyers prominent in Jewish affairs. If there are organizations to advocate on behalf of the Scot-Irish, their lawyers may also support this idea.

Small victory, 800 years late, but totally cool.