July 2022
Lawyers are not particularly popular people, I’ve heard. Maybe it all goes back to Shakespeare’s Henry VI, when Dick the Butcher said to Jack Cade, “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” There’s a whole context around that, of course, and guess what? It had to do with an armed insurrection. It was the insurrectionists that wanted to off the attorneys. And maybe they were right; it sorta sounds like a few of the lawyers involved in our own recent armed insurrection helped it fail. Of course, there were plenty more lawyers who evidently pushed it forward, so I don’t know how much of a recommendation this can be.
But armed insurrections are not all that common, so I don’t think the widespread attitude about lawyers can be due to those. I think it’s much more likely to be something I’d call “lawyerly thinking.” Digging into the details, not of the way the world works (those would be scientists) or how to cure illnesses (those would be doctors), but into the details of how something was said and how you can — if you’re a lawyer — make their words work against them. The idea that changing the name of a thing can become part of changing peoples’ minds about it. Comcast, the most hated company in the US, didn’t change their ways; they just started calling themselves “Xfinity.” Arthur Andersen, the accounting company that aided and abetted the Enron scandal, is now “Accenture.” I don’t know how much this played a part, but “marijuana” is now generally called “cannabis” now that attitudes about it are quite different. And climate change used to be “global warming,” which seems a bit more direct and to the point.
I suspect lawyers were behind all of those, just as they’re behind the decades-long effort to interpret one set of words as meaning something different. The set of words I’m talking about is “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” This was written in the 18th Century when they were not very strict about commas, and in fact the commas are sometimes left out completely, like in the version that New Jersey ratified. I would also argue the sentence is not written particularly well — but any normal person would notice that one of the main things in that sentence is “a well regulated militia.” That is, there’s a militia (a military force made up of regular citizens when needed) that’s subject to regulations. The sentence quite obviously does not mean “people are allowed to carry guns anywhere and everywhere for any reason.” But now a bunch of lawyers — and a crew that’s arrogant and self-important even among lawyers, which is saying something — claims that the correct “interpretation” of that sentence is, yes, “people are allowed to carry guns anywhere and everywhere for any reason.”
Lawyers are often claiming that “precedent” is important. I think what they mean by that is that when other lawyers in the past came up with some particular way of interpreting something, let’s just start from there and not argue about everything all over again. Except they clearly don’t really mean this, because lawyers have in the past come up with ways of interpreting words that are so absurd, addlepated, or flat-out evil that even another lawyer can’t get away with supporting it. Things like “only white males over the age of 21 who own land can vote on anything,” or “women shouldn’t be allowed to (take your pick; vote, attend school, work, get elected…you name it).” Or (and I’m paraphrasing here) “if your skin is darker than mine, that means you only count as a little more than half a person, because, um, just because.”
Lawyers only care about precedent when it serves their purposes. And that’s another reason why people hate them; what they’re good at is arguing, and not sincerely — just to get what they want, whatever that may be. And it’s getting more and more evident that what old caucasian men want (and I’m speaking as an old caucasian man here) cannot and should not be trusted at all. There are an awful lot of people like me who are a big embarrassment to people like me. And believe me, it is embarrassing.
Somewhere along the line, too many of these guys internalized a set of principles that just aren’t grounded in the real world. For some it’s an idea of what their religion is all about that bears very little resemblance to what the religion’s fundamental texts actually say. For others it’s the idea that nefarious forces are active in the world and working agains them, even though these “forces” are usually something invented in a work of fiction. And for even others the problem is their thought that it’s perfectly okay for them — and only them, because arrogance — to pick and choose the people and quotations and events from history that they think “prove them right,” especially when they’re interpreting, say, the US Constitution.
Because they’ve always been very good at arguing. And who knows, maybe they actually feel badly about being so despised. Any normal person would. But they’re not normal. Not even close.
So by the way, why can’t lawyers play hide and seek? Because nobody would look for them.
