Federal Judge Decries Legal System Corrupted Beyond Recognition

Dear Citizen, August 2003

For anyone who has the opinion that criticisms of the legal system is radical ,not reasonable, and fanatical, not fundamental, read this summary by the president’s nominee for the U.S Supreme Court and Bar Association attorney.

The American legal system has been corrupted almost beyond recognition, Federal Judge Edith Jones told Harvard Law School in February. “The Framers created a government of limited power with this understanding of the rule of law that it was dependent on transcendent religious obligation,” said Jones. She said that the business about all of the Founding Fathers being deists is ‘just wrong,’ She says they believed in ‘faith and reason’. “This is not a prescription for intolerance or narrow sectarianism,” she continued, “for unalienable rights were given by God to all our fellow citizens. Having lost sight of the moral and religious foundations of the rule of law, we are vulnerable to the destruction of our freedoms and our equality before the law and our self-respect.”

According to the judge, the first contemporary threat to the rule of law comes from within the legal system itself. “The legal aristocracy have shed their professional independence for the temptations and materialism associated with becoming businessmen. Because law has become a self-avowed business, pressure mounts to give clients the advice they want to hear and to pander to the clients’ goal through deft manipulation of the law. Adverse effects include advertising and shameless self-promotion. The legal system has also been wounded by lawyers who themselves no longer respect the rule of law. An increasingly visible and vocal number of people apparently believe that the strategic use of anger and incivility will achieve their aims. Others seem uninhibited about making misstatements to the court or their opponents or destroying or falsifying evidence,” she claimed. “When lawyers cannot be trusted to observe the fair processes essential to maintaining the rule of law, how can we expect the public to respect the process?”

Another pernicious development within the legal system is the misuse of lawsuits, according to her. “We see lawsuits wielded as weapons of revenge,” she says. “Lawsuits are brought that ultimately line the pockets of lawyers rather than their clients. The lawsuit is not the best way to achieve social justice and to think it is a seriously flawed hypothesis. There are better ways to achieve social goals than by going into court.”

Jones said that employment litigation is a particularly fertile field for this kind of abuse. Recrimination, second guessing, and suspicion plague the workplace when tenuous discrimination suits are filed creating an atmosphere in which many corporate defendants are forced into costly settlements because they simply cannot afford to vindicate their positions. “While the historical purpose of the common law was to compensate for individual injuries, this new litigation instead purports to achieve redistributive social justice. Scratch the surface of the attorneys’ self-serving press releases, however, and one finds how enormously profitable social redistribution is for those lawyers who call themselves “agents of change”. Jon wonders, “What social goal is achieved by transferring millions of dollars to the lawyers, while their clients obtain coupons or token rebates?”

The second threat to the rule of law comes from government, which is encumbered with agencies that have made the law so complicated that it is difficult to decipher and often contradicts itself. “Agencies have an inherent tendency to expand their mandate,” says Jones. “Citizens left at the mercy of a selective and unpredictable agency action have little recourse.”

The Judge said ruefully, “There has been no Great Awakening in the law school classroom since those words were written.” She maintained that now it is even worse because faith and democratic processes are breaking down. The law itself is becoming more fragmented, more subjective geared more to expediency and less to morality. The historical soil of the western legal tradition is being washed away and the tradition itself is threatened with collapse.

“Our legal system is way out of kilter,” she said. “The tort litigating system is wreaking havoc. Look at any trials that have been conducted on TV. These lawyers are willing to say anything.”

Very Truly Yours,

Harsha Sankar

908 Valley Ridge Road

Covington,Virginia 24426