another reason why i want to leave our over-litigous country for another one. (requires timesselect, via overlawyered)
this kind of shit has helped fuck up our medical system, for example. (not to absolve patients, doctors, and insurers from anything, though. really, we all have to compromise. nothing in life is free.) it’s also part of the reason why we have waivers for everything. lawyers want more opportunities to be, well, lawyers! it’s just like the way economists explain everything in terms of market forces.
Dennis G. Jacobs, the chief judge of the federal appeals court in New York, is a candid man, and in a speech last year he admitted that he and his colleagues had “a serious and secret bias.” Perhaps unthinkingly but quite consistently, he said, judges can be counted on to rule in favor of anything that protects and empowers lawyers.
Once you start thinking about it, the examples are everywhere. The lawyer-client privilege is more closely guarded than any other. It is easier to sue for medical malpractice than for legal malpractice. People who try to make a living helping people fill out straightforward forms are punished for the unauthorized practice of law.
But Judge Jacobs’s main point is a deeper one. Judges favor complexity and legalism over efficient solutions, and they have no appreciation for what economists call transaction costs. They are aided in this by lawyers who bill by the hour and like nothing more than tasks that take a lot of time and cost their clients a lot of money.
And there is, of course, the pleasure of power, particularly in cases involving the great issues of the day.
(snip)
Benjamin H. Barton, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, examined some of the same issues in an article to be published next year in The Alabama Law Review titled “Do Judges Systematically Favor the Interests of the Legal Profession?”
That question mark notwithstanding, there is little doubt about where Professor Barton comes out.
He noted, for instance, that the legal profession is the only one that is completely self-regulated. “As a general rule,” Professor Barton wrote, “foxes make poor custodians of henhouses.”
as usual, there is no easy solution. or we would have fixed it by now. also, good luck suing a lawyer for legal malpractice.