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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
January 10, 2010
Lawyers
First, let's kill all the lawyers.I hasten to specify, this is a quote. And to add that some of my best friends are lawyers. And moreover, even after exempting them individually, and despite my very personal experiences with such monstrous stuff as Ontario family law, I do not recommend killing all the lawyers. Such are my religious convictions that I will insist: not even one lawyer should be harmed. In any physical way. The quote is from Shakespeare. Take him to the hate crimes tribunal! Indeed: I'd love to have that docket. I think we could have this Shakespeare up before all the Canadian "human rights" commissions from here to eternity, on the basis of on-the-record quotes, and thus without the usual need for hearsay. His plays are crawling with remarks, the political incorrectitude of which would be the more apparent to Canada's "human rights" commissioners, were they not, as a class, such drooling, humourless, subliterate twits. But fortunately for old Will, he never entered a Canadian jurisdiction. The fact he has been dead for 394 years may also prove helpful to his defence. Not that he needs help, for even when he wrote, he showed a remarkable skill for skating around his contemporary censors. With age, I have come to admire more and more the number of starkly recusant hints he was able to fly in his Histories, like paper airplanes, over everyone's head. Definitely one of my heroes. For the benefit of readers with only a university education, however, I should explain. Even though the quote with which we began is a line in Shakespeare, it did not represent his views. It was put in the mouth of Dick the Butcher, who is responding to a harangue by Jack Cade, the socialist revolutionary in Henry VI, Part Two. (See act 4, scene 2, and passim, for Shakespeare's medieval, catholic and intensely unfavourable views on socialist revolutionaries.) Therefore, some irony was intended. So no, we should not kill all the lawyers. But that doesn't mean they should get off easy. While I support capital punishment in principle, and while a new criminological study has shown, by statistical means, that on average more than two innocent lives are saved for every convicted killer executed in Texas (search: "Raymond Teske"), I favour more subtle punishments for lesser crimes. And this includes, in the case of any political party that becomes dominated by lawyers, defeating them at the polls. This is a point brought home to me by an amusing item a friend forwarded this week, comparing Democrat to Republican party in the United States. The Democrat leadership is all lawyers, and has been for some time. Barack Obama, lawyer; Michelle Obama, lawyer; Hillary Clinton, lawyer; Bill Clinton, lawyer; Harry Reid, lawyer; Nancy Pelosi, lawyer; and so forth. All Democrat presidential candidates since 1984, lawyers -- except Al Gore, who somehow failed to graduate from law school. Compare, if you will, the Republican leadership over the last while, in White House and Congress. The last Republican lawyer to make president was Gerald Ford. Instead: movie actor, spy chief, businessman, successively. Last election: an old soldier, and a PTA lady. Look back at the leaders of the so-called "Republican revolution" in Congress: Newt Gingrich, history professor; Tom Delay, pest exterminator; Dick Armey, economist; Bill Frist, heart surgeon. (And note what the Democrat lawyers did to get rid of them.) Alas, when I turn to Canada, I see all-party government by lawyers; and the interminable legacy of the extremely lawyerly Liberal Party under that lawyer Pierre Trudeau. Moreover, beyond legislative politics (both here and in the U.S.), I review a continuous social revolution achieved by such lawyerly "reforms" as the Omnibus Bill of 1970; or Santa's 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Our lawyers never nationalized banks. In every case, it seems to me, they changed the laws in order to change the people. (The precise opposite of democracy.) People foolishly voted in Trudeau the same way they voted in Obama: "Hope and Change." From lawyers. And this is the wisdom of all the policy czars that President Obama has appointed -- his commando team of lawyers, many with highly controversial, radical left pasts. Superficially, they could be removed from office tomorrow. But if they can rewrite enough laws and regulations, in the smoke and confusion of brief moments in power, they will, in a deeper sense, remain in office for generations to come. I was writing last Sunday in general opposition to the concept of "reform." It is a lawyerly concept, which has narrowed in our time to the tactics of "legislation by litigation," and should be profoundly anathematic to a free society. By increments, the need for lawyers has been extended to every aspect of human life, and the law schools themselves have metastatically expanded. In a sense, our entire society has been criminalized, by lawyers adding to myriad laws that impinge not only on criminals, but on everybody. And by increments, we must find some way to reverse that parasitical growth, which threatens to choke even our humanity. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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