American Legal System Is Corrupt Beyond Recognition, Judge Tells Harvard Law School
Mr. President
Seeing this article this morning, I actually began crying and went very
paralytically catatonic when I realized there was even *one* single judge
left in this country that actually believes what I have known from early
childhood; what most of us have known but quickly abandon for the bobbles
and trinkets of secular nihilism. This article lays out exactly what I have
been contending for; no numinous religious foundation for law = nihilism =
no law = exactly what we've got in the contemporary American world = HELL ON
EARTH. Most people in this nation are living in HELL; Gehenna, Hades,
Spiritual Death; and they talk about *rights* without ever wanting to fulfil
the **obligations** that complement any valid claim to natural rights.
Without God, there cannot and will not be peace or freedom. Men and women
without the Law of God are like fish *chained* to a bicycle; slaves to the
grind, whereas the spokes shore up the chain in an awfully uncomfortable
hurry.
It took me five minutes to stop sobbing and I almost puked. That's how sick
this country and its lawless idolators makes me.
There is hope; if a single Federal Circuit Appellate Judge still believes in
the good Law of God, then there **is** hope that the fire can be
extinguished.
< Mr. President >
< http://brainwashington.com >
< The Deprogramming Headquarters >
American Legal System Is Corrupt Beyond Recognition, Judge Tells Harvard Law
School
By Geraldine Hawkins
March 7, 2003
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.
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Pope Dilbert
"Mr. President" <dev...@brainwashington.com> wrote in message
news:3e6b...@post.newsfeed.com...
This is nothing but conservative political and religious babbling.