Why do advocates feel compelled to blatantly overstate their case? It may fool the uninformed, but it undermines the advocates’ credibility with people whose opinions matter (such as, in the situation I’m going to reference in a second, the county supervisors and the judge presiding over their lawsuit). Some examples from a muckraking article that appeared at AZCentral.com on February 28:
The “gravity of pollution from [the egg farms is comparable to the water contamination in] Flint, Michigan, where dangerous levels were found in the drinking water?” The pollution from the egg farms is ammonia in the air. That’s really as harmful as lead in the drinking water? Egg farms “are now factories – they are manufacturing plants, there’s no bones about it.” An agricultural operation pollutes to the same degree as a manufacturing plant? Never mind that there’s no comparison between an agricultural operation and any manufacturing facility using chemicals. Let’s just talk about smell. Have you ever lived near a paper mill? And finally, no, Tonopah and Arlington are not “on the western edge of metro Phoenix.” They are closer to the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, west of Buckeye, than they are to Buckeye, a historically (and currently) agricultural community that could be considered on the western edge of metro Phoenix. Now, none of those overstatements are from the residents who are complaining about the egg farms in western Arizona. They are from advocates. But as an advocate, I’m here to tell you that overstating your case to that degree is not effective advocacy. The situation with the egg farms doesn’t sound like it implicates the hoary, and confusing, legal concept know as “coming to the nuisance.” I’ll have to discuss that some other time.
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PRIVATE LAW FIRM INSTALLED AS MUNICIPAL PROSECUTORS, BILLS VIOLATORS FOR COSTS OF THEIR PROSECUTIONS2/21/2018 It’s in California, of course. Nice work if you can get it, until you get sued by the Institute for Justice.
Note that the law firm couldn’t have set this up without action by the legislative bodies of the cities to install the law firm as the city prosecutors. IJ says that the setup violates a rule against prosecutors having a personal financial stake in the matters they prosecute. I guess that’s different from government agencies engaging private counsel on contingent fees to pursue lawsuits against private businesses, because that reprehensible practice has been going on for some time. Via Overlawyered. I hesitate to post this because it will reveal that I occasionally waste time reading blog comments. This comment by “The Cracker Emcee Activist” (I have no idea what that means) was so insightful, however, that I think it’s worth sharing. The context was a discussion about how we react to opposition as we age. Here’s the comment (sorry about the profanity): “If someone is above you authority-wise, you still take shit. But it's a lot lot harder not to be caught rolling your eyes when it happens.” Now it’s Instapundit saying, in a column posted at USA Today, that automation is going to replace lawyers. The only concrete example he mentions, however, other than citing a book by another law professor, is a web site that I already pointed out has little potential impact.
He may well be right that automation will make legal information available to people who couldn’t get it otherwise. Far be it from me to question the logic of the Instapundit, but I can’t help asking: if automation is mostly going to benefit people who can’t afford lawyers now, how is that going to hurt lawyers? Anything that helps people find information about their legal problems is fine with me. But equating an internet search engine with a lawyer is like calling the robotic arms on a garbage truck (you know, the ones that pick up the can, dump it in the truck, and put it back down) a surgeon.
People who obviously have their own motives keep coming up with these technologies and claiming that their ideas will, eventually, replace lawyers. I think the obvious comparison to the practice of medicine demonstrates the absurdity of those claims. When you’re ready to have a robot do your brain surgery, let me know. Via Instapundit. Whatever you think of the President’s decision to withdraw the Unites States from the Paris Accord, it’s unbelievable to me that a professor of American studies at Harvard would (a) equate it with the Treaty of Paris in 1783 (Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution says the President can’t enter into a treaty without the consent of the Senate), and worse, (b) assert that the Treaty of Paris “created” the United States (the Treaty of Paris was a bilateral treaty that formally ended the Revolutionary War).
At least the professor provided an opportunity for this history lesson. A post at the Cato Institute blog asks, why is insider trading illegal? It tells the story of what sounds like insider trading at its most benign: a former star ballplayer who just happened to find out from his CEO neighbor that the neighbor’s firm was about to be acquired by a giant corporation. The ballplayer bought some of the stock, and told others to do the same. He profited handsomely when he later sold the stock.
I claim no expertise whatsoever in securities law. It’s a very complicated are, inhabited by specialists. I will never dabble in it. But I can tell you the easy answer to the question posed by that Cato blog post: because it’s cheating. It’s profiting through knowledge that isn’t available to you and me, only to those whose neighbors happen to be CEOs. The argument that it’s a case of “no harm, no foul” doesn’t cut it with me. If my team is stealing the opposing team’s signals, but we lose the game anyway, is the league going to let it slide? I don’t think so. Maybe the Supreme Court confirmation process is something I shouldn’t comment on, because what I say could be taken as political commentary. I don’t think it is political commentary, though, except to the extent that it’s about politicians. Politicians who claim that they can discern a Supreme Court nominee’s bias in favor of one type of litigant over another based on particular opinions the nominee wrote as a judge, or particular clients the nominee represented as a lawyer, are perpetuating the misconception that judges decide cases (or should decide cases) based on which party the judge thinks is more deserving, or that lawyers represent clients because they agree with the clients’ views.
A judge’s job is to decide cases based on the law, not based on whether they think one party is more deserving than the other. If a correct application of the law means that the more sympathetic party loses, then the more sympathetic party should lose. Similarly, a lawyer’s job is to advocate for the client’s interests under the law, regardless of whether or not the lawyer’s personal interests are the same as the client’s. If the client’s legal interests are protected, then the lawyer has done his or her job. They call the idea “hoteling.” I’m not sure I like the name, but the concept is intriguing. Some law firms are using it, I presume as a way to reduce office rent expense. Office rent is a major overhead item for law firms.
The idea is that if you have fewer than 100% of the lawyers in the office each day, why have a permanent individual office for each of them? Instead, you have a number of offices that corresponds to the maximum number of lawyers expected to be in the office each day, and make those offices interchangeable, so it doesn’t matter who uses which office on any given day. The concept probably only works if you have a truly paperless office, with all documents stored in a central server and available on a linked computer terminal. I’m certainly not there yet, and perhaps never will be, but for some reason I find the concept attractive. Maybe someday. It’s a blog post of a newspaper column originally published in 2000, but the advice is timeless:
1) Keep yourself out of court if humanly possible. 2) When appearing before a judge for any reason, “[i]f you have the option of either saying something or not saying something, whenever possible don’t say anything.” Via Overlawyered. |
AuthorThe contents of this blog, this web site, and any writings by me that are linked here, are all my personal commentary. None of it is intended to be legal advice for your situation. Archives
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