The justice system is designed so that judges, juries, prosecutors, defending lawyers, and appeal courts hold no personal responsibility to the acquital of the guilty or the sentencing of the innocent.

There have been many systems or codes of law, and this aspect of American law has been the historical progression of the law for the entirety of human history. It has progressed more and more from vindictive personal revenge motives to impersonal “we don’t care what the verdict is so long as the process is followed” equal protection.

Any system or even any anti-system (anarchy) can be taken advantage of by the greedy, corrupt, and ambitious. The only virtue of America’s adversarial legal system is that it can only be taken advantage of by lethargy and nihilistic beliefs.

The adversarial system assumes that everybody involved in the system is going to try to do some selfish shenanigans to get their side favored over all others. There is supposed to be a balance of powers preventing any lawyer, judge, or jurist from corrupting or taking advantage of the system more than any other element.

THe balance of powers does not work, however, when one or more elements in the justice systems says “I don’t really care about the US Constitution, I’m just going to become a slave to International Law”.

What happens now? What happens to the lawyers, defendants or prosecutors that are interested in greedy and power to manipulate the weak? They get more power, that’s what. Cause the judges are out in the boondocks screwing something that wasn’t even included in the legal system to begin with.

The system, thus, breaks down not because of human flaws like ambition, greed, evil, and what not, no, it breaks down because somebody cheated and destroyed the balance of powers.

Just like they are destroying the balance of powers between Legislative, Judicial, and Executive.

Given that law, the analysis of it, the making of it, and the modifications to it, is no longer accessible to the public, there can be nothing “honest” about it, for when one clique holds a monopoly on reading the law, it is the same as the Church refusing to translate the Bible into the vernacular.

“If we decide government is responsible for everything and no one is responsible for himself or herself how will our society survive?”

We’ll survive by exploiting black people, Mexicans, illegal immigrants, and foreigners that are militarily weaker than us. That’ll last for about as long as Rome had crazy Emperors.

My answer would be, we will survive, of course, but we will not prosper. We’re too powerful, and there is still too much strength to us, for us to simply disappear quickly.

It will take a rebirth of common sense virtues among the people themselves to avoid the long, slow, whimpering death. I see zero chance of that happening. Once a civilization becomes this decadent, I don’t think it recovers.

The one big measure that could spark a change is for every voter to simply “Throw The Bums Out”. But that won’t happen either, because I continue to (sickeningly! nauseatingly!) hear, “MY Congressman is not the problem, it’s those other ones! MY Congressman is perfectly fine.” And so the Congressional Scam continues. And it is everyone’s fault. What you can do is to Throw Your Own Bum Out, no matter how much you’ve had the wool pulled. No one gets out of the vast 1998-2008 Corruption Game free. They’re all guilty. Throw Your Bum Out.

As I mentioned in answer to your comment in another thread, my boss is one of those who can honestly persuade himself of the merit of positions that I think are meritless on their face. Sometimes I convince him not to go forward; other times he goes ahead and makes what he thinks is a meritorious argument anyway. Most of the time when he does this the arguments fail, but they succeed often enough that I’d be hard pressed to say he is unethical for even trying them. Sometimes he steps over a line I wouldn’t step over, but the line is not nearly as clear as the line involved in robbing a bank. Honest people can and do differ over the merit of legal positions all the time.

If putting food on my table requires me to rob a bank, I can expect a consequence.

Tying up the court system, wasting everybody’s time, and imposing a penalty for no particular reason (penalty being: “they’ll pay us rather than pay lawyers to defend themselves”) - incurs no consequence?

Evidently not. Misuse of system used to be something that was considered counter to ethical behavior, but I see little evidence it still is.

Of course rejecting unmeritorious cases should be routine. I’m just saying that if putting food on your table depends on taking on an unmeritorious case, it’s very hard to do the right thing. Thank goodness I’ve never been in that position, but I suspect it’s pretty easy to convince yourself the case has merit when your livelihood depends on it and a client believes in the case enough to be willing to pay you for it.

Attorneys can be disbarred for incompentence, but that rarely happens. Usually, the marketplace takes care of incompetence. The truly incompetent attorney fails in the courtroom and does not get clients. The bigger problem is with incompetent judges, who can theoretically be removed, but, in fact, it’s nearly impossible to get rid of them. And there are lots of incompetent judges!

That says to me that they _don’t_ have very high ethical codes. If you make a law and don’t enforce it, you effectively don’t have a law. If on the other hand, you enforce it occasionally or selectively, you have an even worse situation - you have a corrupt organization.

That doesn’t answer my question though - when does incompetence rise to the level of unethical? Can a lawyer get disbarred for incompetence?

Every attorney must be a member of, and is governed by, the bar association of the state in which he or she practices. Attorneys have very high ethical codes, but they are relatively loosely enforced. In fact, I think I’ll write a post on the subject. Thanks for asking.

And of course you’re aware of all the new competition that will soon be turned out by the new school of law in Irvine…

Why a law school? why not a school of medicine? with all the talk about health costs, why not increase the supply of doctors? when is the last time you heard of an increase of openings for med students? or a new school of medicine opening? The standards for med students are rididulous - why not expand entry levels so that anyone with an A average - instead of only 10% of A+ averages can be accepted? (made up numbers, but I know they’re very small) No need to lower standards for graduates - just for entries.

Of course, even with the number of lawyers out there, the cost of lawyers per hour hasn’t decreased…!! so maybe numbers isn’t the answer. Still, if there are lots of them, maybe instead of suing them, we could get some of the incompetents thrown out. As in “remove their license”.

DQ - what does it take to get a lawyer disbarred? I think I know of “unethical” behavior being a cause, but is “incompetent” ever “unethical” or is there any way of getting incompetent lawyers thrown out? There should be one for judges as well…!