When I was a young computer programmer/analyst 55 years ago, one fact about lawyers then sounds completely incomprehensible from the perspective of the last several decades of life. My eternal soulmate and I worked in an office with a slightly older man named Marty who loved politics and was a peaceful, civilized but rabid political junkie who loved to hang around the Manhattan Upper Westside Democrat Party Club on Broadway at 90th or 91st Street. In that era, the difference in ideology between the two parties was negligible and lawyers and judges were preponderantly honest, principled people who would rarely put their careers or any other personal preference before principled honesty as a lawyer.
We all started as trainees at the Chase Manhattan Bank at a salary of $7,200/year. In the first two years, every six months, a $1,500 raise was pretty certain.
One should understand the mathematical distinction between AVERAGE and MEAN. The AVERAGE is the total value of all units divided by the number of units. (A few very high valued units can distort the average upward.) The MEAN is the value associated with the UNIT in the center of the list from top to bottom. The MEAN is a more accurate portrayal of a typical individual unit’s value.
Though, in those days, some lawyers made a lot more money than most people, if there were millionaire lawyers, they were rare and far between.
In the USA then, the MEAN annual income of a working lawyer was $7,000 – $200 less than a trainee programmer like me. Lawyers were very rarely significantly richer and better paid than the average working American.
There was a widely circulated joke that existed for decades about how Lawyers could expand their income significantly. The joke follows.
There was a little town that had only one lawyer for the necessities – wills, property rights, etc. He had the lowest income and standard of living in town. Then a second Lawyer came to town to also practice, hanging out his shingle at another office. In a short period of time, both Lawyers became so busy and well-paid that they each had to hire outside ‘consultant lawyers.’
There is a pair of medieval terms of potential lawyer illegality that could restrain the evil ambitions of lawyers. The are the following.
BARRATRY meant that lawyers were NOT supposed to initiate legal disputes but only assist disputants with legal procedure ‘issues.’ (The Bill of Rights term ‘right to counsel’ exemplifies this.)
CHAMPERTY meant that lawyers are NEVER supposed to have a financial interest in any legal dispute that involved money.
Because those two offenses are no longer criminal, these two terms have disappeared into the memory hole. For many decades, these two practices have been grossly misused to enrich and empower lawyers – especially political lawyers – not just in America, but everywhere, in this FUBAR world.
I wish to also point out that, in the 28 lines of the famous ‘To Be or Not To Be’ soliloquy in Hamlet, four centuries ago, two of the ‘injustices’ listed by Hamlet were ‘the laws delay’ and ‘the insolence of office.’ They both involve lawyers.
[You cannot have any Bureaucracy of Government without LAWYERS. They are everywhere. (Even the Devil must be rich in Lawyer Bureaucrats or his ‘work’ would never get done. That’s a joke!)]
There is a long-forgotten speculation that was so perfectly true by a great English politician/scholar named Edmond Burke (1729-1797). In school, we all learned that Edmond Burke, a Member of Parliament, supported the American Revolutionary War for Independence because we ‘Colonists’ demanded the rightful return of English Common Law that the King’s governors (and therefore military) were violating. However, when it came to the French Revolution, he had a very different take. That speculation has disappeared.
In 1789, when King Louis called the Long Parliament that had not met for generations so that they could legally raise the tax money to repay the loans that paid for the Army and Navy support for our Revolution against his rival English Monarchy, Burke predicted disaster would inevitably follow. The Estates-General, consisting of three factions, was convened. The Aristocratic Clergy constituted the First Estate. The secular ‘Nobility’ was the Second Estate; and the Bourgeoisie, the common townspeople not held in serfdom constituted the Third Estate.
Burke knew that every decent-sized French town and village had access to a Lawyer who was always educated and verbally adept and sometimes personally so ambitious for wealth and power, regardless of the consequences for the general population. Burke predicted that the most ambitious such Lawyers would destroy civilization for their own advantage. The perfect embodiment of same was the brilliant Orator-Lawyer Maximilien Robespierre (1759-1794), the creator of (in the name of the Committee for Public Safety) the guillotine-employing Reign of Terror.
Proving yet again how Malicious Social Gossip RUMORS when emotionally persuasive and massively promoted can always poison the Truth, by the time Burke died in 1797, this great scholar had left behind a completely wrong-headed History of the French Revolution that became generally accepted in both English and German for decades. A friend had requested Burke’s thoughtful interpretation and Burke’s return letter grew into the gigantic “History of the French Revolution” actually based not on the Truth but the hyperbolic horror stories, exaggerated and over-emphasized emotionally.
The actual history of the French Revolution is accurately contained in Alexis de Tocqueville’s (1804-1859) “The Old Regime and the Revolution,” published in 1856.
(He also wrote another great book called “Democracy in America” in two volumes published in 1835 and 1840.)
Much more to come.
