Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!decvax!decwrl!pyramid!hplabs!ucbvax!UOFT01.BITNET!ASPDMM From: ASPDMM@UOFT01.BITNET.UUCP Newsgroups: mod.legal Subject: BITNET mail follows Message-ID: <8607210941.ab04065@SEM.BRL.ARPA> Date: Sun, 20-Jul-86 19:14:00 EDT Article-I.D.: SEM.8607210941.ab04065 Posted: Sun Jul 20 19:14:00 1986 Date-Received: Mon, 21-Jul-86 21:12:32 EDT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The ARPA Internet Lines: 84 Approved: info-law@brl.arpa Let me begin by saying that I will respond to all INFO- LAW ARPAmail through this BBS since it is my hope to stimulate an open forum for discussion. Also, I'm glad to see that my letter on HELP et al has sparked so much activity on the BBS. So, as Warner Wolfe would say... let's go to the video tape! In reply to Mary Long's note: Yes, it is an elitist view to say that people who aren't informed should not be allowed to vote. And in the history of our nation, attempts to implement such a scheme have met with failure. You are indeed correct that the alternative to preventing, say, the illiterate sector of our population, from voting is to educate them. I suppose that I suffer from the "I've been in University life too long" syndrome, but the idea of people walking to the booth without a clue as to the issues of the election appalls me. To an empty mind, even the smallest idea seems important. Picture for example our anti-lawyer topic. Imagine, then, an electorate of anti-lawyer people (anti-women, anti-jew, anti-gay, anti-blonde... pick one) voting simply on the basis of a nebulous idea of apocryphal origin at best, or even worse, an idea planted or built by someone purposely playing on public ignorance. Given that as a starting point, it is not hard to picture an electorate voting blindly. We had a recent election here at the University on the adoption of a union. I was utterly shocked when I overheard people talking afterwards saying "did voting yes on the issue mean we accept or reject the union?"... Imagine taking such an important issue no more seriously than to be unaware of how one's vote had been cast. I would think that even the most concerned citizen would be discouraged to think that voting would be reduced to the lowest common denominator, no matter what that LCD might be. But I really think that is off the topic. What we are really getting at is how people feel about lawyers. It is indeed the job of the legal genre to "interpret" laws. But that is hardly carte blanche to read into them anything that suits the interpreter. While it is true that laws have been read in diametrically opposite ways at different times, I think by and large they are translated, if that is the right word, as closely as possible to their intent. They say that two things you should never watch being made are sausage and laws. Well, I for one would not only like to watch laws being made, I have a few ideas about making them. I think we should all take an active interest in that. A unified electorate could change the course of legal history in a decade as surely and as much as any supreme court ever has. The ABA is no more the hobgoblin of the law than the AMA. Or the ACLU. And this is directed to Asbed as well.... I think the notion that laws are "interpreted" by courts (not lawyers, by the way) is an overblown idea. It was a hundred years after the civil war that the "lawyers" finally got around to "interpreting" the 13th amendment. All that was done was that an ambitious Thurgood Marshall, then NAACP counsel, now Supreme Court Justice, said, "look... this is the law", and the courts said, "you know, you're right." Marshall didn't find any new laws, nor did he breathe meaning in them that the framers did not intend. He simply wielded the power of the court to give effect to the unmanifest intent of the law. Had that effect been contrary to intent, it would be the duty of the citizenry to intervene. It is said that we get the government we deserve. Likewise for law, I propose. I think people like you are expressing a valid objection to something, the law, the courts, and maybe lawyers too. But it is the law, not the lawyers that control the legal system. And the law belongs to all of us. The illiterate as well as the educated, the rich and poor and, oh this hurts me... the liberals as well as the conservatives. (forgive me William F. Buckley Jr.). Oh well enough pedantism... your turn. Dave