k wrote:

Its bullshit that people need to hire lawyers to solve their problems. Its ridiculous that the law is written in such confusing and arbitrarily convuluted language that ordinary people can't understand their rights or laws that are meant to protect them.

I'm not sure I agree with this statement. I do agree that it would be nice if everything was simple and understandable, but I'm not at all comfortable with the implication that the world is particularly able to offer that simplicity.

In every field of human endeavor, we hire experts to handle things we do not have sufficient time, inclination or intelligence to learn how to handle on our own.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't strive to make the system as reasonable and accessible as possible, but the logical extension of that is not the elimination of subject matter expertise. You can no more do away with lawyers as with programmers or chefs.

Just to take this thread into a completely different direction, I'm not sure I agree that subject matter expertise will always be needed and command a premium. What's changing in our world today is the necessity of using these resources for rote tasks.

One of the reasons for this is the explosion of communications tools that allows anyone to quickly get enough information to ape a subject matter expert in many tasks. Another is the expert systems that are proliferating which provide decision support and context to allow someone with minimal subject matter expertise (nay, follow directions?) to accomplish many expert level tasks (see: Nurse Practitioner). And finally, you have the demand side of the equation, which is to say that the market is not wanting to pay people like attorneys thousands of dollars to do things like issue boilerplate text for your living will.

I bring this up because in a lot of ways, being an 'expert' is starting to look like a poor career choice in a lot of fields. Go walk into a Minute Clinic at CVS and see what I mean.

That fundie guy uses the education he has recieved in science to (attempt to) dismantle its core assumptions and prove that his view of the world is correct. If I can do something analagous with my law degree, without convincing myself along the way that my core assumptions about humanity were wrong, then I will consider this lawschool thing a success.

I think this is a noble effort, but i worry that the last statement shows what I consider a flaw. If you are able to convince yourself that your core assumptions were wrong, then why should you consider that a failure? It implies that your current beliefs are absolutely correct, and that modifying them is unacceptable. This is a dangerous starting point, of course.

Without question, we can't just accept everything foisted upon us without analysis, else we end up as sheep. But I should think that the metric must rather be that we allow change at all times, after careful consideration. That is, the only failure possible is a failure to adequately try to understand the reasons we think a certain way.

And with that, I give you this.

RE: The People's Law Student: Why am I here?