A petition for a writ of certiorari challenging absolute judicial immunity has been filed in the U.S. Supreme Court

A petition for a writ of certiorari has been recently filed and is pending in front of the U.S. Supreme Court with a challenge of absolute judicial immunity.

The petition contains brilliant analysis as to why the concept of absolute judicial immunity is, first, an illegal usurpation of exclusive congressional power and legislating from the bench (an argument I was sanctioned for by a federal court as frivolous), and, second, even as written, was improperly applied by the courts below - and are habitually and systematically improperly applied by a variety of federal courts.

The name of the case is Grazzini-Rucki v Knutson.

The petition is worth analysis in several separate blogs, which I will do over the course of the next several days.

The important feature of the lawsuit, by the way, is that it is a class lawsuit asserted on behalf not only of the Plaintiffs, but also on behalf of "all others similarly situated", on behalf of all litigants against whom judicial misconduct is committed without remedy because of the judge-invented self-serving unconstitutional concept of absolute judicial immunity for malicious and corrupts acts.

Stay tuned.

A petition for a writ of prohibition against Judge Lambert and DA Richard Northrup has been filed

Upon my information, a writ of prohibition was filed by Barbara O'Sullivan in the NYS Supreme Court, Appellate Division 3rd Judicial Department.

Ms. O'Sullivan exposes Delaware County District Attorney and judicial candidate Richard Northrup for failure to disclose to her and the court the fact that Mr. Northrup has been employing the uncle of the alleged victim in the criminal proceeding that Mr. Northrup has brought against Barbara O'Sullivan for 20 years and there is an appearance that he is representing in those proceedings not the People of the State of New York, but is exacting a private vendetta on behalf of his employee.

Ms. O'Sullivan is asserting that the Delaware County District Attorney was disqualified from being present in the grand jury proceedings because of the conflict of interest where Mr. Northrup's employee is the uncle of the alleged victim and where the alleged victim committed a vehicular assault upon Ms. O'Sullivan at an earlier date than the alleged events that are used against her, and yet Mr. Northrup chose not to prosecute his employee's nephew for assault and attempted murder of Barbara O'Sullivan, further disqualifying himself from presenting her case to the grand jury and invalidating the indictment against her as the jurisdictional basis of criminal proceedings.

That's quite a blow to the judicial candidate Richard Northrup, as the petition for the writ directly points out his lack of competence, integrity, proper temperament to be a judge or all of the above taken together.

I wish Ms. O'Sullivan good luck in her rightful fight against corrupt prosecutor and collusive judge.

Since Judge Lambert is a newcomer to the bench and since Judge Lambert previously worked as a prosecutor in Otsego County, a County adjoining Delaware County, I am sure he knew that the Delaware County DA has employed for 20 years Jeff Bowie, who is Derek Bowie's uncle.

Yet, having such extrajudicial knowledge and being a witness in the case, Judge Lambert did not step down either from the civil case brought by Barbara O'Sullivan against Derek Bowie - since the corrupt Delaware County District Attorney did not do his duty and did not charge his employee's nephew with assault and attempted murder, or from the criminal case brought by the corrupt Delaware County DA against Barbara O'Sullivan, the victim of his employee's nephew.

Which says a lot about integrity or, rather, lack thereof, of Judge Lambert.

By the way, at the arraignment, according to Barbara O'Sullivan, Judge Lambert, responding to Barbara O'Sullivan's statement that the whole prosecution against her that is lasting years and that has culminated with the criminal proceedings has been brought in retaliation by the now retired judge Carl F. Becker, stated that "he knows all about it all too well".

Well, if Judge Lambert "knows all about it all too well", I wonder why, being a witness in the proceedings that has to testify on behalf of the defendant, he continues to preside over two proceedings, one by Barbara O'Sullivan against Derek Bowie and another by People of the State of New York (allegedly) on behalf of Derek Bowie as an alleged victim against Barbara O'Sullivan, and has been consistently ruling so far, without legal basis, as far as I could judge from the court records, against Barbara O'Sullivan.

But we do cannot expect honor from the profession who conferred upon itself at the same time a presumption of honor and competence and an absolute immunity for malicious and corrupt acts on the bench, can we?

Once again, I wish Barbara O'Sullivan luck on her petition and hope that the 3rd Department will finally see the light and stop the corrupt proceedings, applying the rule of law and restoring in the public the sense of decency, fairness and at least residual faith in the integrity of at least some of judges in New York judicial system.

More and more books on corruption in courts are published

Recently, several books were published on the issue of judicial corruption and misconduct, despite vicious retaliation against such critics by the judiciary.  I keep track of such books and am honored to be able to recommend them to the public.  Please, note that the list is not exhaustive.  I will be supplementing it from time to time, recommending more books to the public.

I am not paid to make these recommendations to the public, nor did any of the authors or their representatives ask me to recommend such books, it is my personal initiative, since I think these books are deserving of public attention.

No	Author	Name	Date of publication	About the book and its author
1	Barbara C. Johnson	Behind the black robes – failed justice	August 24, 2009	A personal story by an attorney disbarred for, apparently, whistleblowing regarding judicial misconduct and attempt to run for governor on a platform to clean the courts of the State of Massachusetts of corruption Includes great analysis of federal civil rights litigation, including the Rooker-Feldman doctrine, the No. 1 tool of federal courts to clean their dockets of civil rights cases
2	John F. Molloy	The Fraternity: Lawyers and Judges in Collusion	June 14, 2011	Late retired judge, describes mechanisms of collusion and connections between influential attorneys and judges
3	William Ecenbarger	Kids for Cash: Two Judges, Thousands of Children, and a $2.6 Million Kickback Scheme	October 23, 2012	A Pulitzer Prize winner, former editor and reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer describes the corruption scandal in Pennsylvania where two judges were sentencing juveniles to detention in exchange for bribes from a privately run juvenile detention facility.
4	Carrol D. Kilgore	Judicial Tyranny: On the Integrity of the Federal Judiciary	November 11, 2012	Retired attorney with over 40 years of experience, former federal prosecutor analyzes in detail unlawful actions of federal courts committed systematically, as a matter of policy
5	Susan Settenbrino	Unchecked Power Guide: The New York State Court System: A Look at the Entrenched Power, Politics, & Over $2 Billion of NY State Funding - Compromising JUSTICE - for "JUST US"	June 6, 2014	A whistleblower attorney, a former prosecutor, exposes corruption in judicial elections in New York, naming names and episodes of corruption
6	Robert Grundstein	Bad Minds, High Places	January 29, 2015	A whistleblower attorney disbarred for retaliation describes his ordeal, and gives a precise analysis of various ways in which courts in states of Ohio, Washington and (to a lesser degree) Vermont violate litigants’ rights based on partisan connections and collusion with local favored attorneys, political contributors to judges. Great analysis of unconstitutionality of anti-filing injunctions which are increasingly imposed by courts throughout the U.S. upon pro se litigants.

It is interesting to mention that only one author covering corruption from this list is a non-insider, a professional reporter - that is the author of the book about the "Kids for Cash" scandal.

I must add that both judge who were convicted be federal court for taking kickbacks relating to the "Kids for Cash" scandal were referred to disciplinary authorities of the State of Pennsylvania, and escaped undisciplined, until the feds went after them, prosecuted and had them convicted for corruption.

Nobody was interested in publishing victims' stories until the case received overwhelming media attention due to criminal prosecution and conviction of these judges.

Other authors are insiders of the legal system.

The late John F. Molloy was a retired judge who knew insides and outs of the politics of interaction of the judiciary with local politically connected counsel and who felt the need to reveal those inappropriate connections and collusions only after he left the bench and retired from the practice of law, having amassed all financial benefits from both prior to starting his revelations.

The late Carrol D. Kilgore was a retired attorney and former federal prosecutor who published his book "Judicial Tyranny" only after he retired from the practice of law.

Attorneys Barbara C. Johnson and Robert Grundstein published their accounts of judicial retaliation after their law licenses were revoked.

New York attorney Susan Settenbrino does not have a mailing address on her registration information  on the website of the New York State Unified Court System, which indicates that she does not practice law at this time.

All of the books from the list but one, written by a professional reporter, contain scathing and precise analysis by legally trained insiders of the "justice" system throughout the U.S.  Yet, despite the self-anointing by the legal profession, and especially the judiciary as the "honorable" professions, somehow the only accounts of judicial retaliation and misconduct surface when the insiders of the court system leave the practice of law for a variety of reasons.

Such statistics are only confirming that attorneys have a reason to fear retaliation if they criticize judicial misconduct while they continue to practice law.  And that is disturbing, because judges are supposed to be above such petty behavior as retaliation for criticism and are supposed to have been elected and selected for their even temperament allowing them to stomach criticism without exacting revenge against the critics.

I highly recommend all the above books.  They are painstakingly written, are all very good reads, and contain useful information on the topic that is usually under the public radar.

Will there be a constitutional convention in New York in 2018? You decide

New Yorkers will have a chance to change the way they live and allow the government to govern them - through voting on a referendum whether to have a new constitutional convention convene the next elections after November 2017.

In my opinion, a lot should be changed in the New York Constitution to correct the loopholes and flaws in the work of governmental mechanism.

I appeal to my readers even now to send your suggestions so that they can be published.  If you want your name to be mentioned, I will, if you don't want to, I won't, but will reference that a certain suggestion was sent by a reader and not invented by me.

All suggestions are welcome.

I will start publishing my own shortly.  Stay tuned.

New York leads by the number of convictions for corruption

It's hard to believe, but that's what the report says - that the State of New York so far leads the country by the number of convictions for corruption.

The statistics per se appears to be not bad - it can certainly be interpreted as if New York is trying to clean up the mess of its public officials.  Yet, the statistical figures are what is called "unrepresentative" and tainted, because there is no indication as to which convictions, state, federal, both and in what proportion, were considered.

If convictions were by state courts - then we may have a ground for celebration since our corrupt courts can actually use some taxpayer-backed time to do their job instead of what they usually do - fixing cases for their friends, political contributors and potential contributors.

If convictions are by federal courts - that only shows that state courts, and state prosecutors, are unable and unwilling to fight corruption in the government in New York, which becomes more blatant and rampant by the day.

To future researchers and reporters - please, be clearer with the basis of your numbers, so that they actually show something instead of preventing proper interpretation of numbers provided.

On a motion to recuse, if the challenged judge presides over the motion, does he violate The Constitution and act contrary to history and tradition?

I was reading a judicial decision dealing with occupational licensing in another state - state of Texas - and I came across a quote from Andrew Madison like this:

          "No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, 

           because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, 

           and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity," 

           Andrew Madison, The Federalist, No 10, at 79.  

That brought me back to the issue of judicial recusals in the State of New York, and throughout the U.S. state and federal judicial systems, since rules of recusals are similar throughout the United States.

I've researched the law of recusal, through case law, professional literature and my own motion to recuse and resulting actions by judges, for years.

So far, I've conclusively established for myself the following facts:

1/ that motions to recuse are rarely made;

2/ that such motions are rarely made not because they are rarely warranted, but because attorneys refuse to make them out of fear of retaliation from the judge (there is a popular adage amongst the legal profession that making a motion to recuse a judge is a career suicide), and pro se parties are either not educated enough to make them, or are similarly afraid of retaliation;

3) that usually the judge who is subject of the challenge decides the motion;

4) that more often than not a motion to recuse is denied by the judge who is being challenged, and that the judge claims that he "looked into himself, consulted his conscience, and concluded that he is and can continue to be impartial" - which is unreviewable and uncheckable for obvious reasons, you cannot X-ray a judge's conscience, and conscience is an intangible concept;

Yet, let me once again quote from the Founders - since the U.S. Supreme Court and federal and state courts like so much to rely upon "tradition" in their decisions.

I've made so far many motions to recuse, the cases warranted it.

It is apparent that when you challenge impartiality of a judge, and especially when you point out to the judge that he has committed misconduct that is likely to affect the case, a judge who remains on the case to decide the motion to recuse is "a man judging his own case".

Yet, New York appellate courts stubbornly hold that it is within the "discretion" of the judge to decide whether to recuse or not, even though the Code of Judicial Conduct at the same time requires the judge to recuse if his impartiality may reasonably be questioned, and the "reasonable" part is obviously from the point of view of a neutral, impartial reasonable observer.

Absent an "out of body" experience, a judge cannot possibly be impartial reviewing a motion challenging his own self.

Just how "impartial" a judge is in reviewing such motions is easily shown by:

1) the number of sanctions imposed by judges in retaliation for a motion to recuse (I was sanctioned several times by the judge who was the subject of the motion);

2) that attorneys are afraid to make such motions, obviously not believing any such thing as a presumption of judicial integrity and impartiality, no matter what kind of motion is in front of the judge and how it affects him personally;

3) the recent case Shtrauch v Dowd in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York dismissed based on an overstretched concept of absolute judicial immunity which, in the opinion of the federal district court, applies even after recusal of the judge, a judge yelled at a pro se litigant who made a motion to recuse that he is a very dangerous person to dare to "impugn the judge's integrity" by making a motion and then ordered an armed court officer to throw him out of the courthouse.

In my practice, one motion to recuse made in 2009 against a judge on behalf of a client resulted in:

1) a fabricated child neglect proceeding against me and my husband;

2) disbarment of my husband based on fraudulent civil case prosecuted by a retired judge and his son where all applicable law, as well as the record, were in favor of my husband, and were summarily disregarded nevertheless;

3) several sanctions against me for frivolous conduct, including "harassment of the court" (in plain English - harassment of Judge Becker, who was the prosecutor, the victim, the witness and the judge in commencing the sanctions proceedings and imposing the sanctions) which resulted in a disciplinary action against me, I am waiting for its results any day now;

4) several judgments against my husband based on retaliatory decisions of Judge Becker who stuck to our cases like glue, got himself assigned to all cases in all courts and ruled against us in every one of them, in gross violation of applicable laws and in contradiction of the record in front of him - which decisions the Appellate Division, where judges had their own conflicts of interest, eagerly affirmed.

5) vicious rumors spread about me in the community, where judges and their friends were discouraging people from retaining me claiming that I was "nuts", incompetent specifically because I am "suing judges" and because I will soon be disbarred.

I received phone calls from people referred to me by their attorneys for the only purpose of making a motion to recuse (I refused), and in one case, the referring attorney clearly stated to his own client that the referring attorney will not make the motion to recuse himself, because he did not want "to be blackballed", while I, on the other hand, "already have nothing to lose".

So, once again, going back to "history and tradition", as many judges so like to do - what about practice the statement made by Andrew Madison (quoted above) and confirmed as a due process right of every litigant by the U.S. Supreme Court and the New York State Court of Appeals - a man may not preside over his own case.

So, why judges preside over motions to recuse made against them?

Why judges preside over actions in contempt of court where they are initiators, prosecutors, alleged victims, witnesses and adjudicators?

Why judges preside over "frivolous conduct proceedings" where they are, once again, initiators, prosecutors, alleged victims, witnesses and adjudicators?

I guess, those are rhetorical questions.

Because "the rule of law" is a smoke screen for the the plebs and is not supposed to apply to the insiders, stupid.

Testimony of an ethics professor before the New York Statewide Commission for Attorney Discipline: head in the sand and interesting revelations

I wrote on this blog about the New York State Commission for Attorney Discipline - its composition made of market participants only, the way the Commission staged its hearings with testimony "by invitation only", with extremely short notice to the public, held during vacation period, during lunch hours, 2 hours at a time for three days in different locations - all meant to make sure that the least possible number of people shows up.

I also wrote about experts who are members of the Commission and who have a vested interests contrary to the Commission's declared goal - interests to preserve the current status quo in the legal profession and attorney discipline rather than change anything.

Today, I received from a friend a link to the testimony by Professor James Milles, a person privileged enough to have been invited to "testify" before the Commission, published by Professor Milles on his blog.

Update: Since ethics Professor James Milles, after I criticized him in this blog and in court pleadings, removed his proud blog boasting of his unethical conduct, and now you can see only some hieroglyphs if you follow the link to Professor's blog, his testimony can be still read in the official transcript of the New York Statewide Commission for Attorney Discipline, here. 

James Milles is the professor of Legal Ethics in Buffalo Law School.

What Professor Milles said in his testimony before the Commission, and what he did not say in his testimony, is very revealing as to how the legal profession operates and how it grabs and trains new recruits.

First of all, it is very telling what Professor Milles does not say in his testimony.

You will look in vain for such words as "constitutional" or "unconstitutional" in his testimony.

You will look in vain for any meaningful analysis of disciplinary process, or for any analysis of possible constitutional defects in that process.

You will look in vain for coverage in Professor Milles' testimony of the issues of:

1)  selective enforcement and non-enforcement of attorney discipline based on status and connections of attorneys;

2) antitrust and anti-competitive conduct of attorney disciplinary committees in pursuing attorney discipline;

3) separation of power issues in attorney discipline, both on the court side and on the side of disciplinary committees;

4) the effect of attorney discipline imposed by judiciary on independence of legal representation;

5) fear of judicial retaliation for pointing out judicial bias or misconduct and the resulting fear and unwillingness of attorneys to address such issues of public concern in pleadings, mostly because attorneys are regulated by the same branch of the government whose misconduct they have a duty to challenge, with the resulting lack of independence and inefficient representation of clients;

6) vague and arbitrary rules that allow to apply attorney discipline as a tool against dissenters, but allow real violators of ethics to escape discipline;

7) lack of proper records pertaining to attorney discipline;

8) lack of transparency of attorney discipline, which hurts both the public and the disciplined attorneys, 

9) that the right to practice law (to engage in an honest profession in accordance with one's calling) is considered a privilege in New York rather than a constitutional right, as the U.S. Supreme Court said it is, with the resulting less procedural and substantive protections in attorney disciplinary proceedings.

and many other pertinent issues.

Since there was so little time afforded for testimony-by-invitation and the subject of imposition of attorney discipline is so pertinent to both livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people, as well as to the right of access to court that attorneys are meant to ensure, any law professor invited to testify before the commission was, in my opinion, duty bound not to present the commission with a bunch of niceties and common places in his testimony, but to take the bull by the horns and analyze what bothers both the legal community and the public, and is the subject of raging debates in courts and in the social media.

Didn't happen.

What happened is a quote in the testimony by Professor Milles to the book authored by a member of the Commission Professor Gillers - which is clearly inappropriate and, to me, a violation of legal ethics by an ethics professor.  To me, it amounts to brown nosing to quote a book of a presiding decision maker in one's testimony, as such citation has an appearance to gain that decision-maker's favor.

Imagine that you get on a witness stand and say: "I read your book, judge, and I am so very impressed".

Second, it is very telling what Professor Milles does say in his testimony - and especially HOW he says it.

Since the issue of attorney discipline prompted the Chief Judge of the State of New York to create a whole Statewide Commission, to address fairness and uniformity of discipline, and since the declared goal of attorney regulation and attorney discipline is to actually protect consumers of legal services, the public, the testimony before the Commission should, at the very least, be understandable to the public.

Yet, Professor Milles, often in his testimony, spoke in riddles well-laden with legal terms that are devoid of real meaning, and those terms, to me as a prepared reader who knows both the term, the background and what the terms really mean, it appears that certain statements by Professor Milles were meant to obscure the real purpose of certain deliberate gaps in law education, and meant to obscure what Professor Milles is likely afraid to say - that to insist on the rule of law rather than learning the "customs" of judges that lead to "significant variation" of judicial decisions is a career suicide for an attorney.  

I also wrote on this blog that learning the customs and quirks of certain judges have become a business for attorneys, for judges who present such quirks at CLE courses, during taxpayer-backed time, likely for payment.

I wrote that such "continued legal education" courses and the whole concept that, attorneys can satisfy their licensing requirement by learning about "pet peeves" of judges to "better represent clients" is undermining the whole concept of the rule of law which should be blind, uniform, predictable, equally applied and not related to whether a certain attorney attended a CLE course held by a certain judge and paid for that judge's lecture as to what that judge's "pet peeves" are.

Professor Milles, citing to another law professor, from San Diego School of Law, tiptoes around the issue of arbitrary enforcement of the law in courts.

Professor Milles simply quotes:

           "One of the hardest things to teach students is 
            how to deal with the sometimes significant variation 
            in judicial reactions to similar conduct. . . . 
            ‘Pay close attention to custom’ is helpful, and 
            an obvious point, but I do find that students 
            throw up their hands and tend toward nihilism 
            when they perceive how much variation they will face. 
            Teaching realism without nihilism is important 
            but tough.”[11]

Let's translate this quote into plain English.

1/ Law professors acknowledge that "significant variation in judicial reactions to similar conduct" is a problem.

2/ Law professors acknowledge that such "significant variation" may and does cause law students (and lawyers in the future) to "throw up their hands" and "tend toward nihilism" - which is, in my understanding, a roundabout way of saying that when seeing that judicial decisions are plain arbitrary and all over the place on the same issue, law students lose faith in existence of the rule of law, which requires equality, uniformity and predictability of application, which undermines the whole idea of legal ethics;

3/  Law professors acknowledge that they teach law students to "pay close attention to custom", or "pet peeves" of certain judges, which is completely contrary to the whole idea of the rule of law or legal ethics;

4/   Law professors acknowledge that they continue to "teach realism without nihilism", or that they teach, instead of true legal ethics, a course in how to best brown-nose a judge by knowing of his "customs" in order to win a case.

Well, at least in the above statement Professor Milles gives credit to the law student's intelligence, that they weed through the "frames of reference" of law professors and see the core of the problem, arbitrary enforcement of laws, which is a constitutional problem and one of the reasons as to why the judicial system is currently in crisis and lost and continues to lose public trust in its integrity or effective operation.

Professor Milles went further and hinted that it may be that law professors are deliberately limiting knowledge by law students of the disciplinary process so that law students would not engage in ethical violations when they become attorneys.

I am not kidding.

Here is Professor Milles' statement published on his own blog:


           "However, another reason for neglecting disciplinary
          sanctions in legal ethics courses may be a concern 
          that teaching students about sanctions may contribute 
          to disrespect for the disciplinary process and disregard 
          of the ethical rules."

And then:
 
          "Despite the explicit guidance of the Rules of Professional 
           Conduct, what the bar and the courts choose to sanction, 
           and what sanctions are imposed, may say more than 
           the rules do about the real values of the profession.[1]"
  So, in other words, Professor Milles acknowledges that law schools prefer not to teach law students about the disciplinary process because they think that if law students know how attorney discipline works, or how arbitrary application of attorney discipline is, such knowledge will encourage law students to commit ethical violations.

Good grief!

First of all, in New York as in any other state, there is such a thing as a "presumption" of knowledge of all laws.

So, those same students who are deliberately not taught about attorney discipline, are "presumed to know" about attorney discipline - same as every lay member of the public, including illiterate ones.

This presumption exists to encourage members of the public to learn what laws are, in order to be on notice of the laws and to obey them.

Here, a professor of legal ethics admits that to teach law students, future lawyers and judges, about the law of attorney discipline "may be" an equivalent of encouraging these lawyers to violate rules of ethics.

It also says a lot of the low esteem that law schools have of the caliber of law students they recruit and teach.

If a law student, after learning what attorney discipline is, how it is enforced (or not enforced), will supposedly rush into violating of rules of legal ethics, that is to say that the only thing that prevents lawyers from violating rules of ethics is if they are kept by their law schools in deliberate ignorance of the laws.

Once again, good grief!

Sounds to me like a Dark Age religious zealot who would cackle from a pulpit that too much knowledge is from the devil and should be discouraged, not as a modern times law professor.

By comparison, if a member of the public knows about arbitrary enforcement of criminal laws, he or she will rush into violating criminal laws, so let's keep the public ignorant as to existence of criminal laws and how they are applied?  That's the key to law and order?  Ignorance?

If a person learns about the law that provides a procedural protection in the defense against charges of rape and murder, he will immediately go out into the streets to rape and murder?

Everybody has a right to an opinion, of course, but an opinion that ignorance as to problems with enforcement of attorney discipline will lead to deliberate ethical violations by lawyers, coming from the lips of a law professor, is a disservice to the law students he teaches - and that is my personal opinion.

So, presumably, only unethical individuals who only look how to violate rules of ethics, apply to law school, thus making it necessary for law schools to deliberately not teach them about attorney discipline or how it is applied?

And generations upon generations of such law students were thrown upon the unsuspecting public to represent them in court, and states give them monopoly for such representations and, moreover, require that judges be necessarily lawyers and thus members of that presumably unethical class of people?

If that is so, the profession is doomed beyond repair.

*   *   *

I suggest that the real reason as to why students are not taught about disciplinary process is less lofty and more prosaic than what Professor Milles cared to reveal in his testimony.

Law schools are businesses.

They need to recruit law students to survive.

Law education is a very costly investment.

Practice of law usually does not give room to any other business activities, it consumers the attorney's entire time.

If an attorney loses his or her license, he or she is usually blackballed from working anywhere in or near the legal profession, even as a secretary or office assistant, and he or she knows nothing else.

Moreover, losing a law license will adversely affect a suspended or disbarred attorney's ability to get any other license or certification, since during certification process you are invariably asked a question whether you have ever lost a license in any profession.

If law students are taught early into their law school studies, when not too much money or time was invested yet, just how volatile their supposedly lifetime investment into the legal education is, how much it depends on arbitrary decisions, made on a whim, out of spite or in clear retaliation for their professional activities (such as motions to recuse, complaints about judicial misconduct or, God forbid, lawsuits against a judge or other members of the government), many students will choose not to proceed with the education and will take their money elsewhere.

That may be the real reason as to why students as investors into costly legal education are kept in the dark about problems with reliability of their investment.

Which, to me, is a type of fraud by omission against investors and should be exposed as such.

That law professors, professors of legal ethics of all people, knowingly do not include the most important information about reliability, or rather, unreliability and volatility of financial investment in legal education for their law students, and thus mislead them into, possibly, a major financial mistake and disaster of their lives, is downright disturbing.

           *    *    *

As a conclusion, I must point out an interesting discrepancy in Professor Milles testimony that may affect all attorneys who have ever undergone discipline in the State of New York - or who is undergoing it now.

Professor Milles did cite to a case of the New York State Court of Appeals indicating that the main goal of attorney discipline is deterrence.

That case is the basis for New York to apply the lowest possible burden of proof for the prosecution in such disciplinary proceedings - by preponderance of the evidence, and claiming that attorney disciplinary proceedings are civil proceedings, not quasi-criminal, as the U.S. Supreme Court found long time ago.

Yet, Professor Milles, throughout his testimony, refers to ABA-issued standards and makes his own statements which are apparently a reflection of consensus in law professors' community that attorney discipline has, as one of its goals, punishment.

Now, any first year law student who took a Criminal Law 101 course knows that the purpose of criminal proceedings are 4-fold and include the following goals:

1/ punishment;

2/ deterrence;

3/ disability (of perpetrator);

4/ rehabilitation.

So, once a goal of punishment is acknowledged, the proceeding must be deemed criminal, not civil, with all attendant procedures required by state and federal law for criminal proceedings.

Yet, in New York attorney disciplinary proceedings, though now admittedly punitive in nature, are deemed "civil", and afford even less protections than other civil proceedings - in procedure, discovery rights, subpoena rights, appellate rights (or, rather, lack thereof as to all of the enumerated rights).

So, at least something borderline positive came out of Professor Milles testimony - and that is implied admissions and revelations that can be discerned from Professor Milles' statements which paint a disturbing picture as to how attorneys cheat themselves and the public out of the rule of law.