If they’ve ever cheated on their taxes I’m sure there’s some gubmint job to be had.

Unless you really mean to kill all lawyers by pounding them with your fist.

I normally wouldn’t say anything, but the title of a front page article is pretty noticeable.

but, I should sooner clean toilets in the bus station than practice the profession.

In the past 30 years we have more than tripled the number of lawyers per capita and we have, in so doing, destroyed the ethics of them all. One cannot make a decent living as an honest, ethical, moral lawyer.

Ok . . . I exaggerate a tad, but not much. As a social science, the education is great . . . well, it once was . . . now it has been taken over by crazy people with left-wing agendas, but if a law student picks classes, he can still obtain a good degree. Then what?

I have a child starting at UF this summer. She wants a law degree. She’s a conservative. I hope she meets you, as conservatives are a rare species on campuses.

I can admit it….went to law school to feed the old ego. And then when you get there, you have a school pushing a cult that feeds your ego. It was ok if I had to supplicate to some J.O. big firm recruiter, as I was better than the population at large. Luckily for me, it was while a 2L I found riding my bike with my friends a lot more interesting. And then suddenly, my life got better. Gone were the cultish study groups. Gone the cultish studying. Gone was this strange desire to impress people I neither respected or liked.

I rejected the legal cult of personality like a splinter in healthy flesh. I took up hiking and photography on weekends, to avoid the drinking parties. I studied at home and before classes to avoid the study cults, and to keep control over my own time. It hurt my grades, but kept me human, and I still graduated and passed the MD bar first try, so it is possible. Then again, I went to a smallish southern baptist private law school, so the cult was a little different. There was the cult of legal personality, but there was also a second cult of old money, and that made the rejection easier. When your classmates are needlessly displaying their wealth with a new Mercedes from daddy, and you are racking up a house worth of debt to get the education, its easy to decide you’re not one of the crowd. I survived by staying on the fringes, sticking to a few similarly-minded friends, and making sure that my professors knew I wasn’t an idiot, I just wasn’t playing the rigged game. I adored the professors who treated us all like idiots, and dispised those who gave passes to the self-proclaimed elite. The education was totally worth it. I know the intellectual tar knocked out of my by a few professors I now deeply respect, and surprisingly it helped my thinking in all realms of life. It was the education I didn’t get as an undergraduate.

Then again, I’m an unemployed licensed attorney 10 months post-graduation, so YMMV.

Seemingly everyone will need the ‘services’ of a lawyer some time in their life, should tell you all you need to show there are to many lawyers, writing to many laws.
I may need the services of a heart surgeon some time in my life, but I might very well might not, either. And, except for born with defects, there is much I can do to lower the ‘need’ even further.
Not so with the “law”. Which seems to grow more and more daily, often written for the sole purpose of clarifying some previous law that was itself written to correct a previous law.
I completely agree with the concept embedded in “kill the lawyers” idea.

Seemingly everyone will need the ‘services’ of a lawyer some time in their life, should tell you all you need to show there are to many lawyers, writing to many laws.
I may need the services of a heart surgeon some time in my life, but I might very well might not, either. And, except for born with defects, there is much I can do to lower the ‘need’ even further.
Not so with the “law”. Which seems to grow more and more daily, often written for the sole purpose of clarifying some previous law that was itself written to correct a previous law.
I completely agree with the concept embedded in “kill the lawyers” idea.

why is it that so many judges and especially Supreme Court Justices simply can’t read and understand what what plainly intended by the framers of our Constitution?

And why is it that those who study Constitutional law do so largely for the purpose of amending it via the courts and political judges than by the method provided in the Constitution itself?

Sure, you say that means there are too many laws and regulations. On the other hand, when the idiot runs a red light and totals your car, and his insurance company won’t pay, what are you going to do?

That said, as a lawyer who opened her own practice to help those who can’t get BigLaw to notice them, I find these “oh the poor out of work lawyers” story hilarious. Once you have that license to practice, you can work for yourself if you have the gumption to do it. But, so many of these lawyers are so used to someone else taking care of them, they have no clue what to do when fired. Biglaw paid their bar study expenses, for computers, even a clothing budget. When fired, they expect these benefits to continues for several months and are quite upset when they don’t. They are SHOCKED to discover how much healthcare costs when expected to pay for it themselves. Then, never think of adjusting how much they really need (I kid you not, healthy 25 year olds that want everything in the world covered). They are ready to curl up on the floor and give up when another BigLaw firm doesn’t immediate hand them another job. They have almost zero coping skills. Hence, the guy in the story going to work selling sofas rather than taking the risk to go out on his own. These are supposed to the best and brightest lawyers in the country. Would you want someone who falls apart like this representing you in court?

As a practicing conservative lawyer, I couldn’t disagree more with this short-sighted, broad-brush thinking. I’ll be the first to agree that American culture has become over-legalized, with an attendant strangling of innovation and over-employment in the legal profession. And I won’t plead for special sympathy or argue that my profession should be immune from the corrective forces of the market– the same gales of Schumpeterian creative destructive that affect everyone else.

But that doesn’t mean I subscribe to the small-minded school of thought that says “kill all the lawyers” and argues that all of us are a drain on society. Many lawyers do a great deal of good in promoting free enterprise and American liberty. When unscrupulous plaintiffs’ lawyers target businesses large and small with frivolous lawsuits, the defense bar is there to beat them back. When the District of Columbia infringed its citizens’ Second Amendment rights, a determined band of lawyers stepped in to vindicate those rights all the way to the Supreme Court. When Al Gore tried to steal the 2000 election, respected legal advocates like Ted Olson fought to make sure he couldn’t. And all of this ignores the many small, un-sexy ways lawyers contribute to society, like preparing wills, advising businesses, prosecuting crimes, and yes, defending the accused.

Lastly, it makes little sense to indict “lawyers” as a whole for supposedly writing laws that helped us “create our own nirvana.” To pick one example, I was in college when Sarbanes-Oxley– an odious law, to my mind– was passed; I had nothing to do with writing it. But when a SOX-affected company, perhaps fearing the ire of the Obama DOJ, comes to the law firm that I work for to ask our advice as to whether it’s in compliance, what should the firm do? Say “no thanks, you’re on your own?” What should I do if the firm accepts– refuse to work on that matter, because that could be construed as somehow benefiting, in some odd, indirect way, from the passage of SOX? Realistically, I don’t see why I should. Yes, we live in an over-legalized world, but in this circumstance my refusal, or the firm’s, would do nothing to change that.

Rejoicing in the present misfortunes of lawyers might be fun, but don’t forget that we’re human beings with families, just like you. And in today’s raging political battles, many of us are on your side.

You’re the one talking about “killing” all lawyers. So, let me suggest you are the one who needs to lighten up.

You want to comment on lawyers? Have at it. But using this guy’s misfortune as entre to do that was unnecessary.

Here’s to you never having a copyright issue or getting arrested for urinating in public.

Peace,

Sergeant Hulka

This is what makes Obama’s new proposal to send more kids to college so perplexing.

College graduates are being laid off in record numbers. Currently there are 4.1 million out of work.

Most of the jobs that the stimulus plan creates are general construction or data entry and nothing on the horizon to employ the out of wok college graduates that we have already….