It has been reported today that a law school will stand trial on allegations of fraud in luring applicants by inflated claims of employment statistics on graduation.
I am waiting for the brave soul who will be the first to file a lawsuit against a law school for failure to reveal to its students that their investment into legal education - the three years spent in law school, tuition-room-board-books-fees-travel expenses, student loans etc. are, in essence an extremely volatile investment which can evaporate if, on graduation, a student simply does his or her duty, as his attorney's office requires, and criticizes misconduct of a judge which is rampant across the country.
Law schools do not teach that if students do exactly what they are taught to do - represent their clients diligently and competently and apply their knowledge and skilled developed in the REQUIRED Constitutional Law class - they may be sanctioned for frivolous conduct (as I and numerous other attorneys were so far) and their law license may be suspended by the very judges whose misconduct the law graduates criticize.
Law schools do not teach that, if their law licenses are so suspended, law graduates will be unemployable as clerks, law secretaries and paralegals, positions available to people who never had a law degree in the first place.
For example, Massachusets rules ensure that a lawyer may not be employed by a law office even as a janitor.
A janitor who is a high-school dropout can fix a toilet in a law firm, but an attorney-turned-janitor cannot.
That is how this nation is utilizing the skilled labor and brains of their most honest and courageous citizens, attorneys who are taking on judicial corruption.
I encourage law students and those who are considering law school in the future, to ask a lawyer or a professor of legal ethics what to do if you've found out a judge presiding over your client's case did something wrong - received a bribe, engaged in ex parte communication, etc.
Watch their facial expression and body language carefully.
Those law students I know how asked that question and reported to me, reported that law professors visibly shrink, uniformly advised them to "appease the judge at all costs", and to never raise misconduct in court proceedings, nor discuss or report it, orally or in writing, with authorities, colleagues, staff, clients, neighbors or friends.
Because, the law professors told their law students, such a move would be a "career suicide".
But, those same professors did not say that out loud to an audience of law student, and said that in private, in hushed tones, one on one and looking (literally) around to verify if anybody else heard them.
Such is the honorable legal profession, the honorable professorate and the honorable judiciary that regulates that profession.
But, concealing the fact of just how volatile investment in legal education is, while knowing it - is a fraud.
And that fraud should be exposed the same way as fraud in employment statistics.
Because - if you did not get employed immediately, you can get employed at some point.
If you crash your law license by doing what the law school taught you to do in your mandatory Constitutional Law class - you won't be employed even as a janitor.
THE EVOLUTION OF JUDICIAL TYRANNY IN THE UNITED STATES:
"If the judges interpret the laws themselves, and suffer none else to interpret, they may easily make, of the laws, [a shredded] shipman's hose!" - King James I of England, around 1616.
“No class of the community ought to be allowed freer scope in the expression or publication of opinions as to the capacity, impartiality or integrity of judges than members of the bar. They have the best opportunities of observing and forming a correct judgment. They are in constant attendance on the courts. Hundreds of those who are called on to vote never enter a court-house, or if they do, it is only at intervals as jurors, witnesses or parties. To say that an attorney can only act or speak on this subject under liability to be called to account and to be deprived of his profession and livelihood by the very judge or judges whom he may consider it his duty to attack and expose, is a position too monstrous to be entertained for a moment under our present system,” Justice Sharwood in Ex Parte Steinman and Hensel, 95 Pa 220, 238-39 (1880).
“This case illustrates to me the serious consequences to the Bar itself of not affording the full protections of the First Amendment to its applicants for admission. For this record shows that [the rejected attorney candidate] has many of the qualities that are needed in the American Bar. It shows not only that [the rejected attorney candidate] has followed a high moral, ethical and patriotic course in all of the activities of his life, but also that he combines these more common virtues with the uncommon virtue of courage to stand by his principles at any cost.
It is such men as these who have most greatly honored the profession of the law. The legal profession will lose much of its nobility and its glory if it is not constantly replenished with lawyers like these. To force the Bar to become a group of thoroughly orthodox, time-serving, government-fearing individuals is to humiliate and degrade it.” In Re Anastaplo, 18 Ill. 2d 182, 163 N.E.2d 429 (1959), cert. granted, 362 U.S. 968 (1960), affirmed over strong dissent, 366 U.S. 82 (1961), Justice Black, Chief Justice Douglas and Justice Brennan, dissenting.
" I do not believe that the practice of law is a "privilege" which empowers Government to deny lawyers their constitutional rights. The mere fact that a lawyer has important responsibilities in society does not require or even permit the State to deprive him of those protections of freedom set out in the Bill of Rights for the precise purpose of insuring the independence of the individual against the Government and those acting for the Government”. Lathrop v Donohue, 367 US 820 (1961), Justice Black, dissenting.
"The legal profession must take great care not to emulate the many occupational groups that have managed to convert licensure from a sharp weapon of public defense into blunt instrument of self-enrichment". Walter Gellhorn, "The Abuse of Occupational Licensing", University of Chicago Law Review, Volume 44 Issue 1, September of 1976.
“Because the law requires that judges no matter how corrupt, who do not act in the clear absence of jurisdiction while performing a judicial act, are immune from suit, former Judge Ciavarella will escape liability for the vast majority of his conduct in this action. This is, to be sure, against the popular will, but it is the very oath which he is alleged to have so indecently, cavalierly, baselessly and willfully violated for personal gain that requires this Court to find him immune from suit”, District Judge A. Richard Caputo in H.T., et al, v. Ciavarella, Jr, et al, Case No. 3:09-cv-00286-ARC in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, Document 336, page 18, November 20, 2009. This is about judges who were sentencing kids to juvenile detention for kickbacks.
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