A petition for a writ of certiorari was filed with the U.S. Supreme Court, addressing the role of retaliative attorney discipline in widening the justice gap

I have filed my long-suffering certiorari petition with the U.S. Supreme Court.

I am planning to write a separate book as to how to prepare such petitions, based on my own experiences and documented steps as to how exactly to format, print and bind the petition the way the U.S. Supreme Court requires - and save money.

The entire text of the petition is available here.

Of course, the petition did not cover all issues I wanted to cover, because of the word limit and because restrictions to font, text field, page size and presentation of documents in courts below in the Appendix makes it extremely costly to properly present all issues you want to present, so you have to cut them.

The petition raises several important issues:

1) how New York lowers the prosecution's burden of proof in attorney disciplinary proceedings in order to skip hearings and strip attorneys of their licenses without a hearing based on retaliative sanctions of judges sought to be recused,  sanctions are imposed by the preponderance of the evidence standard - while the standard of proof in attorney reinstatement proceedings is higher, and the standard of proof in private attorney discipline is higher, too, not to mention that the standard of proof required by ABA Model Rule and by designation of attorney disciplinary proceedings as quasi-criminal is also higher;

2) how New York uses attorney discipline contrary to its declared purpose (protection of consumers), and thus widen the justice gap by removing predominantly qualified criminal defense, family court and civil rights attorneys working for the poor, while replacing them with uneducated, unskilled and often unlicensed providers;

3) how New York uses attorney discipline as the tool of retaliation in violation of 1st Amendment and Due Process; and

4) how New York punishes attorneys for doing their duty for their clients when New York gives attorneys one and only tool to secure for their clients the fundamental federal constitutional right to impartial judicial review - through confrontational motions to recuse in front of judges who are sought to be removed from the case, and how New York then teaches these judges how to sanction attorneys and removes attorneys' licenses, without a hearing, based on such sanctions.


I stress in the petition that, if the so-called justice gap is as important as the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor recently publicly claimed - to the point that attorney slavery is required in order to remedy that gap - it is a good way to start bridging that gap by simply not widening it further and not removing those attorneys who are already working for the poor.

I describe in the petition the situation that, when attorneys' livelihood is automatically taken, without a hearing, for making motions to recuse, no attorneys can realistically be expected to make such motion - and thus litigants' right to impartial judicial review in New York has simply become unavailable, which is a constitutionally intolerable situation.

The petition points out to the U.S. Supreme Court that the court took 2 cases in the past 2 years dealing with the wrong use of occupational licensing contrary of its declared goal:

1) in North Carolina Board of Dental Examiners v Federal Trade Commission, 574 U.S. ___ (2015),  the Court addressed anti-competitive use of occupational licensing,  and

2) in Whole Woman's Health v Hellerstedt, 579 U.S. __ (2016), the U.S. Supreme Court struck the use of occupational licensing that was declared to protect women's health, while the regulation, in fact, was doing the opposite.

I do not know whether the U.S. Supreme Court will consider these issues important enough for its review.  The petition is in the Court's hands, and I will report on the petition's progress.