Legal System Corrupt judge says.

American Legal System Is Corrupt Beyond Recognition Judge Tells
Harvard Law School
By Geraldine Hawkins
March 7, 2003
3-7-3 The American legal system has been corrupted almost beyond recognition, Judge
Edith Jones of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, told the
Federalist Society of Harvard Law School on February 28.

She said that the question of what is morally right is routinely sacrificed to what is
politically expedient. The change has come because legal philosophy has
descended to nihilism.

"The integrity of law, its religious roots, its transcendent quality are disappearing. I saw
the movie 'Chicago' with Richard Gere the other day.
That's the way the public thinks about lawyers," she told the students.

"The first 100 years of American lawyers were trained on Blackstone, who wrote that: 'The
law of nature dictated by God himself is binding in all counties
and at all times; no human laws are of any validity if contrary to this; and such of them
as are valid derive all force and all their authority from this original.'
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,"
or "way overblown." She says they believed in "faith and reason," and this did not lead to
intolerance.

"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 freedom, our equality before the law and our self-respect. It is my fervent hope that
this new century will experience a revival of the original understanding of the rule of law
and its roots.

"The answer is a recovery of moral principle, the sine qua non of an orderly society. Post
9/11, many events have been clarified. It is hard to remain a
moral relativist when your own people are being killed."

According to the judge, the first contemporary threat to the rule of law comes from within
the legal system itself.

Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America and one of the first writers to
observe the United States from the outside looking-in, "described
lawyers as a natural aristocracy in America," Jones told the students. "The intellectual
basis of their profession and the study of law based on venerable
precedents bred in them habits of order and a taste for formalities and predictability." As
Tocqueville saw it, "These qualities enabled attorneys to stand apart from the passions of
the majority. Lawyers were respected by the citizens and able to guide them and
moderate the public's whims. Lawyers were essential to tempering the potential tyranny
of the majority.

"Some lawyers may still perceive our profession in this flattering light, but to judge from
polls and the tenor of lawyer jokes, I doubt the public shares
Tocqueville's view anymore, and it is hard for us to do so.

"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, to pander to the clients' goal through deft manipulation of the law. While
the business mentality produces certain benefits, like occasional competition to charge
clients lower fees, other 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," The judge quoted Kenneth Starr as saying, "It is decidedly
unchristian to win at
any cost," and added that most lawyers agree with him.

However, "An increasingly visible and vocal number 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?"

Lawsuits Do Not Bring 'Social Justice'

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, 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.

"Seldom are employment discrimination suits in our court supported by direct evidence of
race or sex-based animosity. Instead, the courts are asked to revisit petty interoffice
disputes and to infer invidious motives from trivial comments or work-performance
criticism. 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.'"

Jones wonders, "What social goal is achieved by transferring millions of dollars to the
lawyers, while their clients obtain coupons or token rebates."

 

The judge quoted George Washington who asked in his Farewell Address, "Where is the
security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of
religious obligation desert the oaths in courts of justice?"

Similarly, asked Jones, how can a system founded on law survive if the administrators of
the law daily display their contempt for it?

"Lawyers' private morality has definite public consequences," she said. "Their misbehavior
feeds on itself, encouraging disrespect and debasement of the rule of law as the public
become encouraged to press their own advantage in a system they perceive as
manipulatable."

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. "At the same
time, their decision-making often becomes parochial and
short-sighted. They may be captured by the entities that are ostensibly being regulated,
or they may pursue agency self-interest at the expense of the public welfare. Citizens left
at the mercy of selective and unpredictable agency action have little recourse."
Jones recommends three books by Philip Howard: The Death of Common Sense, The
Collapse of the Common Good and The Lost Art of Drawing the Line, which further
delineate this problem.

The third and most comprehensive threat to the rule of law arises from contemporary
legal philosophy.

"Throughout my professional life, American legal education has been ruled by theories like
positivism, the residue of legal realism, critical legal studies,
post-modernism and other philosophical fashions," said Jones. "Each of these theories
has a lot to say about the 'is' of law, but none of them addresses the
'ought,' the moral foundation or direction of law."

Jones quoted Roger C. Cramton, a law professor at Cornell University, who wrote in the
1970s that "the ordinary religion of the law school classroom" is "a
moral relativism tending toward nihilism, a pragmatism tending toward an amoral
instrumentalism, a realism tending toward cynicism, an individualism tending toward
atomism, and a faith in reason and democratic processes tending toward mere credulity
and idolatry."

No 'Great Awakening' In Law School Classrooms

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 problem with legal philosophy today is that it reflects all too well the broader
post-Enlightenment problem of philosophy," Jones said. She quoted
Ernest Fortin, who wrote in Crisis magazine: "The whole of modern thought has been a
series of heroic attempts to reconstruct a world of human meaning
and value on the basis of our purely mechanistic understanding of the universe."

Jones said that all of these threats to the rule of law have a common thread running
through them, and she quoted Professor Harold Berman to identify it:
"The traditional Western beliefs in the structural integrity of law, its ongoingness, its
religious roots, its transcendent qualities, are disappearing not
only from the minds of law teachers and law students but also from the consciousness of
the vast majority of citizens, the people as a whole; and more than that, they are
disappearing from the law itself. 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."

 

Judge Jones concluded with another thought from George Washington: "Of all the
dispositions and habits which lead to prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable
supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to
subvert these great pillars of human happiness - these firmest props of the duties of men
and citizens."

Upon taking questions from students, Judge Jones recommended Michael Novak's book,
On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense.

"Natural law is not a prescriptive way to solve problems," Jones said. "It is a way to look
at life starting with the Ten Commandments."

Natural law provides "a framework for government that permits human freedom," Jones
said. "If you take that away, what are you left with? Bodily
senses? The will of the majority? The communist view? What is it - 'from each according
to his ability, to each according to his need?' I don't even remember it, thank the Lord,"
she said to the amusement of the students.

"I am an unabashed patriot - I think the United States is the healthiest society in the
world at this point in time," Jones said, although she did concede that there were other
ways to accommodate the rule of law, such as constitutional monarchy.

"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."

Potential Nominee to Supreme Court

Judge Edith Jones has been mentioned as a potential nominee to the Supreme Court in
the Bush administration, but does not relish the idea.

"Have you looked at what people have to go through who are nominated for federal
appointments? They have to answer questions like, 'Did you pay your
nanny taxes?' 'Is your yard man illegal?'

"In those circumstances, who is going to go out to be a federal judge? People who have
accomplished nothing. In other words, federal employees."

Judge Edith H. Jones has a B.A. from Cornell University and a J.D. from the University of
Texas School of Law. She was appointed to the Fifth Circuit by President Ronald Reagan
in 1985. Her office is in the U.S. Courthouse in Houston.

The Federalist Society was founded in 1982 when a group of law students from Harvard,
Stanford, the University of Chicago and Yale organized a symposium on federalism at Yale
Law School. These students were unhappy with the academic climate on their campuses
for some of the reasons outlined by Judge Jones. The Federalist Society was created to be
a forum for a wider range of legal viewpoints than they were hearing in the course of their
studies.

From the four schools mentioned above, the Society has grown to include over 150 law
school chapters. The Harvard chapter, with over 250 members, is one
of the nation's largest and most active. They seek to contribute to civilized dialogue at
the Law School by providing a libertarian and conservative voice on
campus and by sponsoring speeches and debates on a wide range of legal and policy
issues.

The Federalist Society consists of libertarians and conservatives interested in the current
state of the legal profession. It is founded on three principles: 1) the state exists to
preserve freedom, 2) the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution
and 3) it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to state what the law is,
not what it should
be.

 

The answer is obvious.

They are thinning down our Constitution, right?

Go ye and thin no more!

LOL

 

One of the major problems so called "patriot" and pro se litigants has is trying to force modern law into being the kind of social justice that Jesus preached.

Simply isn't going to happen.

God bless them for trying none the less.

 

A press release just in from Magna Carta News Service.

A group of terrorists just invaded a convention of judges from all over the nation holding them hostage.

The terrorists threaten to release one judge an hour if their demands are not met!