Human Survival in Peril!

Stamp Out Unlicensed Practice of Law; 

How to Know If You Are Culpable?

by Professor Pounding Migraine

Oxymoronic Chair in Legal Ethics, Yukon,

              New Haven, Conn.

 

The “Unlicensed Practice Of Law” or UPL is akin to shouting “THEATER” in a crowded firehouse [i]--you do not have the unconditional right to do it... 

If a theater exists that justifies shouting you may actually be required to shout. Only by consulting a lawyer can you guess and that poorly. Ambiguity makes the study and practice of law such an adrenaline rush for professional and amateur alike. Besides, "the clearer the law the more likely the right person will be convicted. Then the appellate courts judges would be out of work." Attributed by Justice Ginzberg to Justice Scalia who supposedly believes all theology hangs on a few executions from time to time without regard to race, creed, previous conditions of servitude or innocence.

COMMON LAW TO UNCOMMON JABBER

The practice of law was relatively messy among the Angles and Saxons who also threw food at each other at frequent wolf downs. Then the Normans invaded.  

[t]his royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, 

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, 

This other Eden, demi-paradise, 

This fortress built by Nature for herself 

Against infection and the hand of war, 

This happy breed of men, this little world, 

This precious stone set in the silver sea, 

Which serves it in the office of a wall 

Or as a moat defensive to a house, 

Against the envy of less happier lands,

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.[ii]

In 1066 William the Conqueror defeated “this happy breed of men.” The French brought order (sic) for the first and last time in their nation's destiny in the court and linen napkins to the tables of England. Bye the bye the conquered and their conquerors fornicated enough to forge "this [relatively] happy breed of men" again. Thanks to early arbitration panels in which the Norman lawyers arrived ahead of time they angled the Saxons out of their property. But they did give their valuable time. They called it "pro bono" because it sounded like more hours in Latin. This practice is now largely vestigial.

In 1215 at Runnymede the English ignobles pinned down King John. They found out he was sleeping with the Archbishop of Canterbury's daughter. In a shakedown prefiguring Jesse Jackson he signed Magna Carta. He was livid. King John defrocked and beheaded his cousin the Archbishop for fornication. Legal nit-pickers argue to this day which he did first. This comprises the law school curriculum. Students learn to squabble over "tempests in a teapot."  With the ignobles and the King busy slaughtering each other, Magna Carta gave the illiterate cave dwellers of England a little slack. King John could no longer make up laws or change his mind as to what they meant. Our Supreme Court has been backpedaling since.

Until the Norman Conquest UPL (Go ahead and click) stood for a pushcart company. Originally, it involved bussing, as in FOB Detroit, which means free on board to the passenger as far as Detroit. After that, it is anybody’s guess. Legislators write most laws like that. That way anyone can be guilty of anything. 

HELL & THE ACLU ARE PAVED WITH NOTHING BUT LAWS

The ACLU entered the fray. You knew it would. It's motto is "Never Leave Well Enough Alone When You Can Create Pandemonium." Bussing resulted in torched cities and racial hatred by purest chance. Today, nobody rides busses except winos. Hey, nice going ACLU and Supreme Court.

A book dealer in New York City sent a copy of Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” to a customer in Ypsilanti, Michigan. When the filthy merchandise reached Detroit the company seized it and refused to return it to the dealer until all the local UPS truckdrivers finished reading it. Instead UPS, the successor to UPL,  turned it over to J. Edgar Hoover, He memorized it and then denounced it before Congress as the smut America's young men and their fathers were drowning in. Those words woke up many senators and congressmen. They usually aren't up until middday and they certainly don't read. But they read this and reread it until they could quote it word for word. Then they banned it. O.K., here's the website.

The ACLU represented the buyer in the landmark case of Indignant Readers v. Simony and Huckster in 1933. They lost. The appeal is still working its way up to the Court of the Supreme Beings.

LAWYERS combat LAY SELF-REP AS SUICIDE.  WE DO BETTER. CHIEF JUSTICE AGREES: 90%  INEPT

Oh! Happy people to have lawyers as their zealous watchmen who keep guard night and day with but one interest, our well being! Most can’t afford their “services.” 

Our divinely ordained Court of the Supreme Beings first ruled that mere mortals could not represent others before the bar of justice. It has since revisited this crime scene several times for naught.  [iv]

Yet in the memorable words of the always late Chief Justice Warren Burger, “90% of trial lawyers are incompetent. [v]” He went on— and on and on to note “We may all be on our way to a society overrun by hordes of lawyers, hungry as locusts, and brigades of judges in numbers never before contemplated.” Nostradamus never achieved that level of prophesy.

Burger was a very sick man. He had a deep-rooted inner love/hate relationship with his inferiors who for a Supreme Court justice means everyone. He fascinated his psychoanalyst. Alas, the analyst died in a suspicious fire that consumed his notes.  

Burger's psychoanalyst

In Strickland vs. Washington, 466 U.S. 668 (1984) Burger's own Supremes forgot to look into whether an attorney who dies early in the trial can still be said to meaningfully represent his client. See clairvoyance and séance.

For all his criticism, Burger once again proved that “the only man in whom ignorance of the law is not punished” is the lawyer. Frank McKinney Hubbard, Roycroft Dictionary and Book of Epigrams, 1923. Now that there are slightly more female attorneys than males Americans that doubles the pleasure doubles the fun. (The first reader who incorrectly identifies the product that jingle sold receives a life supply). 

New York's courts are even worse. Chief Judge Kaye vaguely knows something is rotten.  ". . . The Chief Judge, after noting the history of the matrimonial practice reforms, observed that "...it is apparent that the discontent is broader, and that public confidence in the entire legal system has seriously eroded...". She borrowed that phrase from Charles Dickens' harrowing description of the French Revolution in a Tale of Two Cities. Only he didn't water it down for public consumption.

NATION BORN HATING LAWYERS

Our Founding Fathers tried to hide from their mothers the shame that they were lawyers. Most expected their sons to become preachers or, at worst, traitors. [vi] See Samuel Eliot Morrison, Closing Down the Bars: Alcoholism and Farm Foreclosures in the American Colonies.

No decent farmer wanted the shame of his son becoming a lawyer or, worse, a judge. So most judges kept on the move, riding around in circuits (they still do) with lawyers in tow. This circuit riding led to their tradition of circular reasoning which also continues unabated.

The colonists drove lawyers like prostitutes out beyond the town line. Otherwise neighbor would be turned against neighbor and the community left impoverished. To survive being snubbed by everyone but criminals and Tories lawyers huddled together. In time, they crouched behind bars where they associated with each other. Only lawyers now claim it a high privilege to breach the bar. Laymen may not approach the bench. Rugwart J. Offal, Regis Philbin Professor of Naugahyde History, Princton University, researched the matter and found most laymen just sit down on benches rather than following the odd practice of scraping up to them, bowing and walking backwards until they bump into an object.. [vii]

WHY STATE CAPITALS ARE STILL GRUNGIEST PLACES

Have you ever thought why none of the respectable towns in the original thirteen states other than Boston and Richmond wanted to be capitals? That's where lawyers hung out. [viii] Those who followed the law had to practice in such shabby places as Albany, Harrisburg and Trenton. They remain shabby.

Even Wilmington refused the dubious distinction of being Delaware’s capital although it is bigger than Delaware. For an analysis of how this is possible see Marx, G., "Either this is a Dead Issue or My Watch Has Stopped," 13 Azusa Law Journal 5067 (1955)

JOHN MARSHALL ASCENDS THRONE AND JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING GOES TO HELL

The Founding Fathers created "one supreme court" presuming when they all died it would go out of business. Being realists, they threw in lots of inferior courts, aware how rare are any but mediocre lawyers. See Art. III, Constitution. Senators and members of the House had to meet certain qualifications. Anybody could go in and sit on the Supreme Court bench, eat a sandwich, talk a while and go on their way. Lawyers made up the rule that only they qualified to mildew on the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Rehnquist admitted in a whispered reply in a recent CSPAN interview that he was proof anyone could hold down the job. 

It would help those pagan gods get both feet on the ground if they had to discuss decisions with a few shrewd laymen. Not so many as to get in the way, but just enough to give the judges with law degrees a standard to aspire to. [xx]  

Then John Marshall came along. The reader would agree that he came at the right time if he knew Marshall's many philanthropic acts. Being right on time, he helped himself and his cronies early and often. Such help includes land grabbing and decisions protecting rich crooks. He just made up rules as he went along,  like crooked friends not having to pay back what they stole while he wrote poetic prose on the sanctity of property rights. [xi].

Rip Van Winkle must have been Marshall's mentor. But he had an excuse. He slept through the Revolution. Our Lords Supreme often closed their eyes to the Revolution. In Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), Marshall found that the King of England overruled the sovereign people of New Hampshire. In 1819!  Was Marshall daft? Property rights going back to the Norsemen trumped liberty. He upheld Dartmouth’s royal charter in perpetuity, then his immediate successor the notorious Roger Taney of Dred Scott fame turned that on its head in Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge, 11 Pet. (13 U.S.) 420 (1837).
The Woodward decision barred New Hampshire forever from making Dartmouth its state university. Name me another Revolution other than the Mardi Gras where the deposed King still rules?

WHAT EXACTLY IS UNLICENSED PRACTICE? NOTHING EXACT IN LAW PRACTICE. WHY CALLED PRACTICE.

You ask, “look, lawyers make up laws. They  make no sense." How long did it take you to figure this out? They intend this like doctors do writing illegible prescriptions. Do you really think every doctor has a gene for illegibility or lawyers for pomposity? These characteristics take time to cultivate.

How can I ever know what constitutes unlicensed practice?” You’re lucky. You came to the right place. UPL or UPS as it is now known, is another example of a black hole in every law and court decision. However, what UPL is, that's easy to remember. Anything attorneys see as a potentially lucrative source of income fits their ever-shifting definition of the practice of law. If lawyers could make money trapping monkeys up trees they would prohibit it to laymen.

DOES UPL VIOLATE FREE SPEECH AND FREE ASSOCIATION? SUPREME COURT SAYS "OF COURSE, NOT. WE WOULDN'T ANYMORE ALLOW ANYONE TO BE A BRAIN SURGEON." 

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Notice that the First Amendment says nothing about brain surgery. That's more than we can say about the present Supreme Court. Nine likes and dislikes. It's only a matter of time before some brain-damaged "public interest" law group brings a case on restaurant ratings. We'll end up with a Federal Zagat's Guide. 

We don't have to like our brain surgeon.  We don't care about his beliefs. We only care whether he cut the mustard well. Besides we are usually, like the Court, unconscious, when a brain surgeon works on us. This is the very opposite of lawyers. They are unconscious when they work on us. Law school teaches them how to sleep while appearing all there.

I'm going to make this simple for the reader. Judges had difficulty with simplicity. It's some vague memory from before law school. 

The First Amendment bothers Supreme Courts because a child of five can understand it. A child of five knows you don't limit freedom of speech and expression because a person could hurt themselves. My daddy used to say, "you have the right to swing your arm until it hits someone else's nose." Unfortunately, my father may have been law at home, but his common sense never got to Washington.

The First Amendment has a lot to say about why lawyers shouldn't be forced down the throats of clients who don't want any lawyer they are allowed to pick from. My cable company offers 220,000 choices of channels. Still they are all the same.

If I want to complain before a court, why should I have to hire a a perfect stranger (the only time lawyers are perfect is when they are strangers) to do it for me, especially if I don't want to pay his ridiculous fees for bad work done and even work never done? Who wants to be represented by someone they do not know, like or trust? Besides I am genius at complaining, especially about other lawyers and judges.

Even in a India with its caste system, the government doesn't tell illiterates who they may hire to write for them. Our legal system is more a caste system then India. If someone wants a political scientist, a comic, a housewife with domestic experience, a used car salesmen, an accountant, a sharp debater, a great actor to represent them, why should the courts even care whether and what contract two grownups enter into? 

If you know how to bamboozle people, could have a career in Hollywood or Capitol Hill, have no moral qualms and know how and who to brown nose you already have all the attributes of a lawyer except the degree. The Supreme Court would be snowed by you. That's it! They don't want people smarter than they are to trick them. 

Their only worry should be that a non-lawyer should not pass himself off as a lawyer. Why would he given what Chief Justice Warren Burger said about the incompetence of lawyers?

You gotta pay dearly (over $120,000) to get into the guild by wasting three years in law school. And that's Notre Dame, not Harvard or Yale.

UPL, remember now UPS, is the moral equivalent of mob control of the carting industry. If you can collect garbage cheaper, quicker and neater and do so on someone else’s turf you are violating the UPL of the carting industry. This customarily results in your body being found long after decomposition in the trunk of a rusty old Chevy with a bullet lodged in your brain. The mob makes the case that this is a public service. Otherwise, why, why, why, we would have CHAOS! Lawyers borrow from the Mafia the defense of their monopoly. [xvi]  

Remember, be suspicious of any law that purports to protect you from yourself. Someone is trying to make a fool of you.  [xii].

THINGS ONLY LAW PROFESSORS CRAZY ENOUGH TO BELIEVE

Between Roman law and the common law stands the independence of the layman from all. Roman law may not be tyrannical, but it doesn’t encourage the English tradition we inherited of suspicion of government and its officers as outsiders. Citizens play no role in Roman law. Professional judges and prosecutors and even defense lawyers are puppets of the court and decide trials.

Common law is common sense. Any competent person can deliberate on both the law and the facts. In fact, if the jury finds the legislature wrote a joke and called it a law, they can throw it out regardless of what the judge tells them. They are the Supreme Court in that courtroom. 

It doesn’t take special training by dried-out law professors who think telephone directories are poetry. They turn flesh and blood Pinocchio back into a puppet. Psychotics exhibit this trait.

George Orwell, the century's most insightful critic of totalitarianisms of the left and right, blamed the scholarly class for the destruction of liberty:

There are some things only intellectuals are crazy enough to believe. George Orwell (1903-1950)

Common law results from warm blooded neighbors solving their own problems. Over time, give and take that works gains the force of law. It tries to avoid conflicts. It doesn't come down from one-size-fits-all theorists. Lawyers take minor irritants and blow them up with helium into mult-million dollar balloons. They walk away with the handmade suits and their clients with the balloon. But you can't even fly to Cancun in that helium balloon.

JURY NULLIFICATION BOTH A CRIME AND THE LAW

This is much too depressing and too big a spider's web to be dealt with  in one piece. It contains material enough for an encyclopedia of humor. I will touch to it. Or go elsewhere. But be aware you'll get someone's angle and they will be entirely unconscious of the mineshaft of laughs just below the surface. That's a golden mother lode there for the humorist!

The Supreme Court has held that “ . . . although a judge may direct a verdict for the defendant if the evidence is legally insufficient to establish guilt, he may not direct a verdict for the State, no matter how overwhelming the evidence.” [xv]

LEGAL SECRETARIES, PARALEGALS, AND THE ROSEMARY FURMAN CASE
FEMINISTS, WHERE ARE YOU? PRACTICING ACLU LAW, MAKING MILLIONS

The most successful CEOs wouldn't ask anyone but paralegals and secretaries to do their legal work. These ladies know more about calendar practice than lawyers forget. And the case is irretrievably lost if the statute of limitation runs out. [xviii] These ladies can run procedural circles around lawyers and for that reason are paid pittance. 

Feminists! Oh! Feminists! What has NOW done for equal pay for paralegals and legal secretaries, almost exclusively female? Justice Ginszberg helped found the Feminist legal industry from her perches at Columbia Law School and the ACLU's Reproductive Rights (euphemism for abortion) Project. Nothing. NOW is run by Feminist lawyers. Lawyers first. NOW and the ACLU got Shannon Faulkner into the South Carolina's all-male military academy Citadel for a day in 199. Bill to the taxpayer and profit to ACLU? $6 million.

Either lawyers aren’t all that skilled or so-called nonprofessionals work harder for a lot less.  They don’t have a degree to hide behind.

One or two lawyers could have ended up here while blindly wandering the Internet. They might have stopped to read the barnyard freshness of English again. They get so little chance. If the two lawyers think I am harsh he or she should attend David Siegel's lecture on New York practice. Professor Siegel obviously enjoys teasing New York lawyers. They are notoriously lazy and tempt fate by shelving a client's case until it is on the verge of runing out of time. [xix].

The New York courts only excuse lawyers for "law office failure". Laymen representing themselves never get let off if they miss a deadline. Now, how can an office fail? It's like Feminist nonsense language about a chair heading a department. I wouldn't pay $20,000 a year to send my children to any college headed by a piece of furniture. Siegel, New York Practice 2nd, 1991, pp.. 340-341.

Until the Great Depression most UPL laws—if they existed at all—like adultery were toothless. Only when the Depression dried up demand did lawyers start prosecuting little old ladies in earnest. Lawyers weren't eating for the first time. That’s why many layman who are not eating because of lawyers look back on that period as a Golden Age.

Florida's Bar nearly jailed paralegal Rosemary Furman in the 1970s. They threw millions at her prosecution for UPL. Remember, its now UPS. She had a perfect record. She filed the papers flawlessly mainly in divorce cases and on time. Her clients actually had assets left to share . Her memory continues in the many states now where upward of 80% of divorces are filed pro se.

Lawyers fear work. They fear testing their claim of superior expertise by competing with any comer and letting the market set the price.  

If you want to read the notes following that's your business. I wrote this piece tongue in check. The notes are factual and farcical. But they are so boring. If you find mistakes, don't blame me. I can't get myself to read them again. Some of the links still work. Others I have no desire to fix. Some of text I cut but left the note, because it was funnier or takes up less room. 

CLICK HERE TO READ THE NOTES. WARNING: DO NOT READ IN REVERSE ORDER. IT MIGHT INDUCE A PSYCHOTIC EPISODE OR AN IRRATIONAL OBSESSION TO GO TO LAW SCHOOL.