Legal Reform Resources

Four things belong to a judge:  to hear courteously, to answer wisely, to consider soberly and to decide impartially.

When you have no basis for an argument, abuse the plaintiff.

Who shall guard the guardians themselves? 

 . . And the judges shall make diligent inquisition:  and, behold, if the witness be a false witness, and hath testified falsely against his brother; then shall ye do unto him, as he had thought to have done unto his brother. . .

Woe to those who decree unjust statutes and to those who continually receive unjust decisions, to deprive the needy of justice, and to rob the poor of my people of their rights:

Every lawyer is sorely vexed at me because I preach so harshly against the craft; but I say I, as a preacher, must reprove what is wrong and evil. If I reproved them, as Martin Luther, they need not regard me, but forasmuch as I do it as a servant of Christ, and speak by God's command, they ought to hearken unto me; for if they repent not, they shall everlastingly be damned; but I, when I have declared their sins, shall be excused. If  I were not constrained to give an account for their souls, I would leave them unreproved.

Ye that are studying under lawyers, follow not your preceptors.   In abuses or wrong cases, as if a man could not be a lawyer unless he practiced such evil.  God has not given laws to make out of right wrong, and out of wrong right, as the unchristianlike lawyers do, who study law only for the sake of gain and profit.

The abilities required in a good interpreter of the law, that is to say, in a good judge, are not the same with those of an advocate; namely the study of laws...The things that make a good judge, or a good interpreter of the laws, are, first, a right understanding of that principal law of nature called equity; which depending not on the reading of other men's writings, but on the goodness of a man's natural reason, and meditation, is presumed to be in those most, that have the most leisure, and had the most inclination to meditate thereon. Secondly, contempt of unnecessary riches and preferments. Thirdly, to be able in judgment to divest himself of all fear, anger, hatred, love, and compassion. Fourthly, and lastly, patience to hear; diligent attention in hearing; and a memory to retain, digest, and apply what he hath heard.

Unnecessary laws are not good laws, but traps for money.

For all words are subject to ambiguity; and therefore multiplication of words in the body of law is multiplication of ambiguity.  (which leads to injustice and many unnecessary  processes)

The courts must declare the sense of the law; and if they should be disposed to exercise will instead of judgment, the consequences would be the substitution of their pleasure for that of the legislative body.

The constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please. It should be remembered, as an axiom of eternal truth in politics, that whatever power in any government is independent, is absolute also; in theory only, at first, while the spirit of the people is up, but in practice, as fast as that relaxes. Independence can be trusted nowhere but with the people in mass. They are inherently independent of all but moral law.                                                Thomas Jefferson, letter to Judge Spencer Roane, September 6, 1819.
The germ of destruction of our nation is in the power of the judiciary, an irresponsible body - working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall render powerless the checks of one branch over the other and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.

The jury is the only anchor ever yet imagined by man by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution . . . the jury is the ultimate safeguard of our civil rights.

The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether here appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

Irresponsible power is inconsistent with liberty, and must corrupt those who exercise it.

    
The people are the rightful masters of both congresses and courts-not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert it.

Discourage litigation.  Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can.  As a peacemaker the lawyer has superior opportunity of being a good man.  There will still be business enough. 

If the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.

Take all the robes of all the good judges that have ever lived on the face of the earth and they would not be large enough to cover the iniquity of one corrupt judge.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Great men are almost always bad men.

A peasant between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.

It is the people and not the judges who are entitled to say what the Constitution means, for the Constitution is theirs, it belongs to them and not to their servants in office.

If business utilized its plant equipment as wastefully as it does its lawyers, we might be bankrupt instead of being the most prosperous nation in history.  The first step toward a preventive practice of the law must come from the layman to check litigation at its source.  The lawyer is assuming an increasingly important a role as an adviser to business organizations—large and small.

I have come to fear almost everything having to do with law. Though there are many fine people in the legal profession, and though law is necessary to protect society from descending into chaos, I now fear the legal profession more than I do Islamic terror. I am far from alone. I believe that more Americans rightly fear being ruined by the American legal system more than being killed by a terrorist. 

Twenty-four percent of the adult American population has reported for jury service.  The remaining 76% of Americans live with, live next to, work with, or otherwise hear about the experiences, good and bad, of those 24% who have lived it first hand."

The better the society, the less law there will be.  In heaven there will be not law. . . .  In hell there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed.

It is never too late to challenge the usurpation of power. . . Usurpation-the exercise ofpower-not-granted is not legitimized by repetition.

 
Where there are too many policemen, there is no liberty. Where there are too many soldiers, there is no peace. Where there are too many lawyers, there is no justice.

A judicial activist is a judge who interprets the Constitution to mean what it would have said if he instead of the Founding Fathers had written it.

The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science that smiles in your face while it picks your pocket.

Be frank and explicit with your lawyer. It is his business to confuse the issue afterwards.

There is never a deed so foul that something couldn’t be said for the guy; that’s why there are lawyers.

When there is a rift in the lute, the business of the lawyer is to widen the rift and gather the loot.  

The trial lawyer does what Socrates was executed for:  making the worse argument appear the stronger.

They all laid their heads together like as many lawyers when they are gettin' ready to prove that a man's heirs aint got any right to his property.

Litigation is the basic legal right which guarantees every corporation its decade in court.

What's the use of that, Wendell, a lawyer can't be a great man!

The ideal client is the very wealthy man in very great trouble.

He saw a lawyer killing a viper on a dunghill hard by his own stable; And the Devil smiled, for it put him in mind of Cain and his brother Abel.

... The U.S. Constitution was contemplated "as a rule for the government of courts, as well as of the legislature."

Seventy-five percent of all American lawyers are incompetent, dishonest or both.

All litigation is inherently a clumsy, time-consuming business.

To demonstrate that our society is drowning in litigation, one only has to look at the overworked system of justice, the delays in trials, the clogs businessmen face in commerce and a medical profession rendered overcautious for fear of malpractice suits. The litigation explosion, which developed in barely more than a decade beginning in the 1970’s, has affected us at all levels...

Clients increasingly view lawyers as mere vendors of services, and law firms perceive themselves as businesses in a competitive marketplace. As the number of lawyers in this country approaches one million, the legal profession has narrowed its focus to the bottom line, to winning cases at all costs, and to making larger amounts of money. Almost every complaint about the decline of ethics and civility “sounds the dirge of the profession turning into a trade”.

Somewhere “out there” beyond the walls of the courthouse, run currents and tides of public opinion which lap at the courtroom door.”

The law makes a promise—neutrality.  If the promise gets broken, the law as we know it ceases to exist.

How can a system founded on law survive if the administrators of the law daily display their contempt for it?

A lawyer is a man who helps you get what is coming to him.

... You can not be a good lawyer until you are a complete man....

... (many judges) believe our Constitution is a 'living document' that must change with the times. Those who share this view are purveyors of conflict and chaos. If you have no consistency and fixed constitutional rules then you have no Constitution. The Founding Fathers allowed for change, but it was for the people not a few self-appointed platonic guardians wrapped in robes of self proclaimed paternalism....

. . . In bankruptcy proceedings unsecured lawyer’s fees are paid and use up the assets before unpaid school property taxes are paid.  I can’t see why lawyers should be given special treatment just because lawyers wrote the bankruptcy code.

... For both (the English and American legal system) law is thought of as essentially judge-made; legislative rules, no matter how numerous, are viewed with some discomfort because they are not the normal expression of the legal rule. They are only truly assimilated into the American legal system when they have been judicially interpreted and applied and when it is possible to refer to the court's decisions applying them rather than the legislative texts themselves. When there are no precedents, the American lawyer will say: "There is no law on the point," even though there may be some legislative provision covering the matter. ...

. . . the best check on the excesses of litigation is not the rules of the profession or even judicial oversight but the values and character of individual lawyers.

... I have argued that lawyers should not engage in litigation tactics that frustrate or distort the search for truth, such as covering up a client's perjury. Lawyers often argue that it is impossible to maintain high ethical standards during a lawsuit. You may not want to play hardball, but if the other side does, you feel no choice but to respond in turn....

... In general, Christians are to settle their disputes within the community of faith and bear their wrongs patiently without retaliation. Resort to the courts is allowed only in the exceptional case when it can be undertaken without impairing Christian love and ties that bind the community of believers. Everything hinges on the disposition of the litigant. 'In all this' says Calvin, 'love will be the best guide'...

The only justice in the halls of justice is in the halls

We have the wrong idea of law.  Law is not supposed to avoid values of right and wrong, but to assert and affirm those values.

Statement made by the inventor of tobacco litigation when asked if the trial lawyers were trying to run America:    “Somebody’s got to do it”.

Harvard Law School's Prof. Mary Ann Glendon notes that formal legal ethics standards have been 'dumbed down' over the years, eliminating words like 'right' and 'wrong' and making moral considerations optional.

Legal handbooks these days do everything but condone outright lying.  

Just as the perfect Supreme Court candidate for these time is someone who’s never written or said anything about the law, the perfect juror is someone who has not read or heard anything about the case.

. . . So we turn to the law to control relationships between people.  Simple neighborhood disputes, that in other countries are solved by social pressure, are the subjects of writs and torts in ours.

When Thomas a` Becket said no to King Henry II’s request that he lawyer a state takeover of the church, the king had him murdered.  When Thomas More refused to renounce his Catholic faith, declare the king to be head of the Church in England and legally rationalize the sovereign’s divorce, King Henry VIII had him beheaded.  Maybe that’s why in our age attorneys Thomas a` Becket and Thomas more are remembered as saints, not as lawyers.

Fifty or more years from now, as mankind travels to the outer reaches of the solar system, lawyers will still be clipping their $500 million tobacco coupons.

Quite simply, contingent fee contracts between a state and a private attorney should be illegal. In a free society, we cannot condone private lawyers using the power of the state to enforce public law -- with an incentive to increase the penalties. As the Supreme Court cautioned more than 60 years ago in Berger v. United States, (295 U.S. 78 (1935)) an attorney for the state, 'is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all.’

One of the big stories of the past decade is how the lawyers have taken over government.  By this I am not referring to lawyers’ winning elections—something that dates to the republic’s earliest days.  What has happened is that lawyers, acting on their own and deploying various legal devices, are increasingly trying to set government policies by themselves.  Litigation substitutes for political debate and legislative struggle.  It’s not a healthy development. . . . Government by litigation subverts democracy; litigation as politics subverts the law. 

“Suing the bastards” has become a populist battle cry that glosses over deep social conflicts.  The vast tobacco fees mean that many well-financed trial lawyers can contend with any major industry. Politicians—often receiving lawyers’ campaign contributions—find it increasingly convenient to aid or join the suits.  The drift is plain; it bodes ill for both the law and politics.

[Lawyers] have an economic interest in cultivating and prolonging conflict. This means they are fundamentally at odds with the purposes of the legal system. Courts and lawyers exist only to explain and enforce the rules society sets for itself--and settle disputes arising from these rules. . . . The trouble is that lawyers' well-being runs in the opposite direction. The more conflict, the better. The more cumbersome and ambiguous society's rules, the better.

. . . the expanding importance of lawyers, as private litigators and as legislators and creators of “administrative law” in regulatory agencies, has become a controversial aspect of the American rule of law.  The cycle is self-sustaining:  The more laws and lawsuits there are, the greater the demand for the talents of lawyers who can interpret legislation or argue civil cases before juries, which often are carefully shielded by lawyer-designed evidentiary rules from any real understanding of what is at issue.

Striving to be fair to every victim, we’ve undermined not only our common good, but everyone’s freedom to use their best judgment.  The moral authority of victims is powerful.  But the resulting laissez-faire, lawsuit culture means that social policy gets made, by default, at the intersection of personal tragedy and personal greed.  All of society ends up victimized by the victims.

Suing is not a unilateral right of freedom, like free speech or a property right.  Those hallowed constitutional rights—the safeguards of our freedom—protect us against government power.  Suing, by contrast, is a use of government power against another free citizen, coming down to that fateful verdict when the full power of government may compel the defendant to pay millions.  Being sued is like being indicted for a crime, except that the penalty is money. 

Law isn’t supposed to be a neutral process.  It’s supposed to set standards for right and wrong.  Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once observed that law is a “standard which we hold the parties to know beforehand . . . not a matter dependent upon the whim of the particular jury.”  Today, justice is standardless.

 [A] runaway tort system and skyrocketing jury awards [are] driving medical insurance costs out of sight, causing doctors to retire early or leave the states and threatening medical care so the people that are really hurting aren't doctors or insurance companies, but patients." –

[W]e should be serving the interests of the patients, not the self-interest of trial lawyers as needless litigation does incredible harm to our healthcare system. It costs everyone time and money - especially patients who need care quickly - and can destroy the bond of trust between physician and patient. Frivolous lawsuits drive up insurance premiums for everybody, and discourage employers from offering employee coverage at all. It is really important to remember that we want to help doctors to heal, not encourage lawyers to sue. 

Our great cornerstone of democracy, the rule of law, has become a source of power and influence, not liberty and justice.  I resent the insidious manipulations of those entrusted with such authority and even more, I despise our deliberate ignorance and passive acceptance of those shackles on the American spirit.

President Bush is prudently proposing the imposition of caps on medical malpractice awards for pain and suffering… But these ceilings are merely a stopgap. They deal with only one aspect of what greedy trial lawyers and timid judges are doing to destroy the American healthcare system.

The courts in America are meant to be venues for redress of genuine wrongs.  They aren’t supposed to be lotteries to win vast riches that increase the temptation for officers of the court (lawyers and judges) to rig the game.

In a 1981 study, Stanford’s Deborah Rhode found that only 2% of complaints against non lawyer practices came from consumers; the rest were brought by lawyers or state bar associations, which have made a career out of harassing competitors.

There are some who feel that appointing the judiciary is a superior method of judicial selection to election of judges by the people, but I have not seen any evidence that appointed judges are superior to elected ones.  Are politicians more qualified to pick judges than the people who elected them?  And if the people are unqualified to elect judges, what makes them qualified to elect state legislators, U.S. congressmen or a president?

After years of refusing to govern our trial lawyers, it seems they have decided to take it upon themselves to govern us.  It is not too late to do something about it.  But neither is this a problem that can be solved overnight by a quick fix such as tort reform legislation.  As I said before, the ideas that underlie the new legal system and way of governing were born in the academy.  This is where our judges and lawyers learned them.  And now these ideas are being spread among the general public by the system itself.  For instance, these lawsuits teach us again and again the principle that some distant institution with a lot of money is responsible for each individual’s problems.  It is this distorted view of responsibility that makes thinkable today claims that were unthinkable a few short years ago.  So the first step in turning things around, I would say, is to come to a real understanding of exactly what we did wrong in changing the rules of our legal system and handing the trial lawyers so much power.

   The proclaimed goal of trial lawyers is to hold every profession and industry accountable for their actions, yet they have created a litigation-based policy-making process in which they themselves are almost entirely unaccountable

Indeed, if anyone still doubts that lawyers have moved from their control of the Congress and the statehouses to now include a mastery of corporate America, he should look again.  State attorneys general have seized the tobacco industry and made it into a cartel earning rents on behalf of state treasuries.  Plaintiff lawyers are milking corporations for billions with product-liability class actions.  The Sarbanes-Oxley “corporate responsibility” law has arguably made the general counsels of companies more powerful than CEOs by giving the lawyers legal responsibility for minding the behavior of other executives.  

The rule of law is vital to the proper functioning of a democracy.  If it is corrupted, the system itself is threatened.

Our agenda for jobs and growth must help small business owners and employees with relief from needless gederal regulation, and protedtthem from junk and frivouous lawsuits.

I want to remind the people on Capitol Hill, you cannot be pro-small business and pro-trial lawyer at the same time.

Here malice, rapine, accident conspire, and now a rabble rages, now a fire; their ambush here relentless ruffians lay, and here the fell attorney prowls for prey; here falling houses thunder on your head, and here a female atheist talks you dead.

It is very sobering to me, as an American, and someone who actually believes in our system, to see foreign companies say over and over that the one thing they won't put in their contracts is a clause that this is going to be governed by American law or be subject to an American jurisdiction.  It makes one wonder whether we are really the most sophisticated commercial country in the world or a banana republic when you get major worldwide corporations doing that. I think it is a sobering issue for the American judicial system.

Lawyers’ disdain for the idea of justice, while holding ever tighter to the trappings of legal power, is similar to that of a cleric who no longer believes in god but holds tight to his salary and his rent in the parish house.  But there is one huge difference.  Unlike the parishioner of a moribund church, the average American can’t simply quit our legal system and continue the quest for justice elsewhere.

However, in light of the volume of pro se filings in this Circuit, we cannot disregard the potential burden on court administration associated with conducting frequent inquiries into pro se litigants’ mental competency

What we have here is an unregulated business profession whose stock in trade is their expertise in the law, which they trade for profit within the judicial branch of the government

Liberalism, having lost its ability to advance by persuasion, increasingly relies on litigation.  In its flight from arenas of representation, liberalism has used the judiciary as its legislature. 

Personal responsibility, once the cornerstone building block of our great nation, is gradually being eroded and replaced by a sue unto others before they sue unto you mindset. 

Like cockroaches in the kitchen, lawyers colonize our legislatures. The plaintiffs' bar, made rich by immoral suing, has become the second most powerful lobby in the nation and buys political influence to sustain the corruption with its ill-gotten gains. This legalized mayhem that stifles innovation, destroys lives and industries and reputations, raises the cost of almost everything by 10 to 50% or more, that smothers even generosity and kindness due to liability apprehensions - this poison will not go away quietly. But until the nation's citizens awake, arise, and demand change, the great millions of Americans will continue to pay and continue to suffer at the hands of the mere 800,000 legal terrorists who make up the so-called "bar."

“the only people who contribute to the election of judges are the candidates’ mothers and those with an interest in the outcome of litigation.

With attorney fees routinely running upwards of $150 or $200 per hour, a dispute must be worth at least $20,000 before it becomes cost effective to hire a lawyer.  If it is any less, the costs of resolving the problem—including lawyers’ and court fees—loom larger than the problem. 

People are much more likely to stand up and tell the unvarnished version of what happened when they represent themselves.  Something about a lawyer being in the process, coaching people to alter their stories, results in victory becoming more important that telling the truth.

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