Obama’s Pet Comes Calling for Scraps
August 10th, 2009DENIED
I just received a phone call that offended me.
The American Bar Association wanted me to rejoin. I shut them down fast. I said they were too liberal for me, and that they should give me a call when they ceased being a political organization.
This bit of pandering filth is from their own website: “The ABA opposes federal, state or territorial legislation to create special legal immunity for the firearms industry from civil tort liability.”
That, all by itself, is sufficient reason to oppose these overweening social engineers. You can find plenty of other reasons if you Google.
I joined the ABA when I was in law school, to get substantial discounts on a few things I needed. Bar-prep classes. Bar exams are idiotic; the ABA accredits law schools AND helps write bar exams. Does that make sense to you? “We vouch for this school, but we want to subject its graduates to an overly difficult test which bears almost no relationship to practice or to the materials they learned in school, to make sure they’re qualified to take entry-level jobs where they sit around looking at Westlaw all day.”
One of two things has to be true. The ABA’s accreditation is garbage, or the tests are unnecessary.
Very often, money explains this kind of foolishness. That’s probably the case here. It is virtually impossible to pass the Florida bar exam without a prep course. The crap on the test is not substantially related to the material taught in law schools, and you can’t pick it up in practice. So you have to spend thousands of dollars and waste months preparing. Where do the thousands go? Down here, they go to a company called Bar/Bri. It’s a great thing for them. No one else can get you through the test, and the test is mandatory. They could charge ten thousand dollars, and people would have to pay it. My guess–and it’s only a guess–is that Bar/Bri has been known to spend money cozying up to bar associations, to make sure this silliness continues. A lawyer who can make his “educational” services indispensable can become wealthy without ever entering a courtroom. That’s a fantastic temptation.
If law schools are producing people who can’t practice–and they are–the answer isn’t a redundant test. The answer is accreditation that means something. Law schools accept truly inept people because of affirmative action or because they have pull, and the result is a substantial number of graduates who are beyond hope. At my school, they flew affirmative action recipients to another state before their freshman years, to teach them in advance and give them a patently unfair jump on the rest of us. And a lot of these people still washed out or could not pass the bar exam or could not keep jobs because they simply did not have the mental horsepower to do the work. The others didn’t need the costly cheat, so it was a waste.
There was never any doubt that I would be able to practice law. That is true of the majority of law school graduates. It’s wrong to subject us to expensive tests, wasting months of our productive years, to weed out the people who were admitted and passed because of bogus accreditation. If a law school produces substantial numbers of graduates who can’t do the work, that law school should not be accredited. Aside from that, the free market is the best bar exam. If you’re not bright enough to practice, the free market will remove you from the system. You will not be able to earn a living. The inept graduates law schools should never have accepted eventually run into this natural filter, and it does a great job.
If you try to set up a solo practice, and you stink, judges will squash you, jurors will laugh at you, you will be sued for malpractice, people will refuse to hire you, and you’ll leave the profession. If you work for someone else, and you stink, that person will eventually fire you, unless he marries you. This is all much fairer than an exam process which costs a tremendous amount of money.
I needed the ABA to save money on the tests it helped perpetuate, so I joined. Like a lot of people, I did not renew my membership. I’m not paying these socialists to slander conservative judges and attack my civil rights. I’m not paying them to support bottom-feeding tort parasites in their efforts to bleed society dry. What are they thinking, taking offensive political positions and then asking moral, patriotic people to fund them? It’s crazy.
They claim to promote professionalism, in order to make the public happy. The public doesn’t hate lawyers because we’re unprofessional. Not primarily. They hate us because we’re greedy, ruthless bullies who destroy other people’s lives unnecessarily. No popular legal association will ever do anything about that. The foxes aren’t going to guard the henhouse.
I took the Bar/Bri course. I took two courses, now that I think about it. I’m sure my law school made money from it, because they supplied the facilities. I paid to see a lecture by a famous professor who travels around the country reciting the same spiel over and over. About 95% of the material I studied in the courses has been of no value to me in practice. And I have to wonder; if I paid $80,000 in tuition and still had to do this in order to be considered qualified, am I not entitled to a refund?
If you’re a conservative attorney, do not let the ABA have your money. If for no other reason, decline to join because I refuse to accredit them.
August 10th, 2009 at 10:08 AM
A Radio Talk guy you may have heard of in Atlanta named Neal Boortz is also a lawyer by education and trade years ago.
He’s also a libertarian and co author of “The Fair Tax” book.
Any way, he’s always bitching about “The BAR” and the AMA and their interaction with government along with all of the other organizations accreditizing other forms of professionals…forcing up the cost of admission and participation in professions in order to cover the asses of the morons already in practice.
For instance, Georgia licensed “massage therapists” some years ago and at that time Neal was going to a lady who worked out of her house, wasn’t a prostitute, and gave 6’4″ tall Boortz the relief he needed for his back.
As a result of the government mandated “TEST” and the associated license “FEE” his older lady massage therapist quit offering her services because Georgia Government made it illegal for him to enter into a contract with her as a private citizen because she refused to pay for a certificate to hang on her wall and operate out of a dedicated space outside her home.
Just another perfect example of government stepping in in the name of protecting yourself from yourself, and raising the price and reducing the quality of service in the name of “government certification.”
Engineers, Lawyers, Doctors…it’s all the same. Neal and I say let the FREE MARKET let the Quacks be Quacks and the Geniuses be Geniuses, and let the idiot zombies that studied law but don’t have the mental and intestitinal fortitude to actually practice it without the BAR and the Government backing them move on to using their more basic skills…possibly working inserting suppositories and washing feet or cleaning toilets or digging ditches.
August 10th, 2009 at 10:26 AM
Steve – I agree with you wholeheartedly about the ABA – I never joined and periodically have the pleasure of refusing their entreaties to do so. Political scum of the worst sort.
Max
August 10th, 2009 at 10:27 AM
“What are they thinking, taking offensive political positions and then asking moral, patriotic people to fund them?”
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They’re thinking that “It’s the way it is” and they’ll get a free pass. And they’re correct. Every individual has a level of corruption they’ll put up with. We may tell ourselves it’s “corruption -OR- ineptitude”, but it’s simply amoral behavior. Which should be treated as such. But “tolerance” has let this baloney slide.
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When normal folks across the nation are willing to silently accept these levels of duplicitous behavior in the name of “Learned Professions”, it’s no wonder that folks like Pelosi (et al) are surprised when the minions backlash (finally) against commandments from their high gov’t.
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August 10th, 2009 at 10:33 AM
Professional associations have all too often (perhaps all? I don’t know all of them, so as to be sure) sem to have abandoned much pretense at overseeing the profession and become cravenly blatent political organizations (seemingly all with a heavy Leftist bent). Other groups have too – like AARP.
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Heading to hell in a handbasket we are.
August 10th, 2009 at 11:43 AM
My Mother is a Massage Therapist and she loves the new IL State certification. Before that she was always complaining how anyone could walk in off the street and call themselves Massage Therapists.
She spends a good chunk of her time taking extra classes and picking up certificates.
August 10th, 2009 at 1:59 PM
How many times can Glenn Reynolds say “Heh, indeed.”?
August 10th, 2009 at 3:34 PM
Seems to me that while it might be argued that a “massage therapist” should require some training and licensing, a “masseuse” is qualified as long as she applies the oil and rubs.
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As Erik implies, the main reason for bars and guilds is to eliminate competition and drive up prices.
August 10th, 2009 at 5:26 PM
Yeah, but if we didn’t have state certification we could end up with morons practicing and taking peoples good money while letting them lose in court because of their incompetence.
Hahahahahahahhahahahahha. I crack me up.
I had to tell my divorce lawyer how we were going to win and we did and she was amazed. Then I paid for my ex-wife’s incompetent lawyer so we could finalize the deal.
When my son was in court, I had to coach our lawyer. Seriously. When we got down to the last charge, I asked the prosecutor why she was so vehement on the last charge. She said she’d be damned if she was going to let me get him off on everything. I told her I’d be darned if I’d see him get a bogus felony, but he wanted to admit some guilt and apologize. So we plead to a misdemeanor. His lawyer just stared at us. Of course, he got paid.
August 10th, 2009 at 5:29 PM
I’m a newer attorney that accepted the free ABA membership given upon graduation with the intent to never renew once it came time to pay. I’ve made a point of tossing all the subsequent bills and yet they continue to send me renewed membership cards each year. It looks like I’ll need to actively cancel my membership.
I’ve assumed they are suffering membership declines and are faking the numbers with unpaid memberships.
August 10th, 2009 at 6:37 PM
Ed, it’s very strange. On the one hand, a lay person is at a huge disadvantage in a lawsuit, and there really is a good reason to go to law school. Generally, lay people get killed in court, and they don’t understand how difficult law practice is until the hammer lands on them. On the other, once a lay person has a basic grasp of the law applicable to his situation, he can very often embarrass his stupid or lazy lawyer, simply by having more common sense and caring more about the outcome.
August 10th, 2009 at 8:21 PM
I am so, at this very moment, forwarding a link to this post.
August 11th, 2009 at 6:16 AM
Ed, you crack me up to. I’m a licensed engineer and the same applies to that profession. The rubber stamp is no assurance of competence or quality of service. In fact it means that someone probably completed the educational requirements, passed two tests, had the old boys sign for entry into the club, and of course, paid fees for the government to operate with limited competition.
Experience has shown this to be generally true of all licensed “professions.”
It all boils down to the character and integrity of the individual you’re dealing with.
August 11th, 2009 at 9:12 AM
ErikZ – You’re talking about a state license, not a profesional association. How would your mom feel if she joined the American Massage Therapists Association and they turned arond to spend her dues money on lobbying to enact gun, abortion and civil rights regulations.