Deuteronomy 4:2, King
of kings' s Bible Ye shall not ADD unto the word which
I command you, neither shall ye diminish [ought] from it, that ye may keep the
Commandments of the "I AM" your God which I COMMAND you.
WOE unto you LAWYERS & LAWYER-JUDGES!
By: Fred Rodell
(A Review & Commentary)
By: John Raker
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
George Barnard Shaw
I first learned about a book entitled: Woe Unto You Lawyers by Fred Rodell when I read a quotation from it in some other article I was reading. Lucky me, I was able to find a copy of this unusual book in a used book store. It was published in 1939.
Mr. Rodell, who was a Professor of Law at Yale University for many years, presents a lusty, gutsy attack on what he calls THE LAW, from tribal times to the present.
He writes in his preface: No lawyer will like this book, because it was not written for lawyers. He relates also to his realization early on of the phoniness of the whole legal-process.
It is the lawyers who run our civilization for us--- he says. All the judges (a judge is a lawyer who knew a governor, the author relates) are lawyers; they interpret and enforce our laws, he continues. There is no separation of powers where the lawyers are concerned..... only a concentration of all governmental power --- in the lawyers.
As explained by the Devil in the film "Devil's Advocate" - JAH.
All around us in our daily lives, the author explains, that lawyers guide us through a maze of confusing gestures and formalities that the lawyers have created. But the amazing thing about all this is, THE LAW is carried on in a foreign language..... the law deals almost exclusively with the ordinary facts and occurrences of everyday business.... But it deals with them in a Jargon which completely baffles and befoozles the ordinary literate man....
Purposely - JAH.
Unfortunately this happens to be so and the lawyers want to keep it this way because, the lawyers’ trade is a trade built entirely on words. Furthermore, lawyers, like the medicine men of tribal times, actually believe in their own nonsense, and the general public doesn’t even realize that it is merely a racket. If the people could just be made to understand how much THE LAW is a hoax, they would not let the lawyers lead them around by the nose.
THE LAW, relates Mr. Rodell, is all things to all lawyers simply because the principles on which it is built are so vague, abstract and irrelevant that it is possible to find in those principles both a justification and a prohibition of every human action of activity under the sun.
Mr. Rodell continues to explain that actually we have brought all this upon
ourselves. In our daily actions and goings-on, if man just could be trusted
to act decently, in general there would be little need for a law of any kind.
It is a rather disconcerting fact to learn that mankind has stooped so low,
that no one can trust anyone else anymore.
http://jahtruth.net/comand.htm
In the chapter titled THE LAW AT ITS SUPREMEST the distinguished law professor touches on constitutional law and its fundamental concepts.
-1- He states, what all informed already know, that if Congress, any state, city or village enacts a law that is forbidden by the Constitution, that law might just as well never have been enacted. In order to get around some of the wording of the Cccconstitution the Supreme Court has evolved a batch of principles, sub-principles and hocus-pocus of solemn words spoken with a straight face, meaning intrinsically nothing.
The author also points out, as we all know, that one man, one judge, holds the meaning of the CON-stitution in his hands. Lawyers and Judges are merely trained mechanics in the manipulation of that machine known as THE LAW.
They take a problem, translate it into the appropriate legal symbols, push the buttons on the big machine (perhaps the author referred to todays computers already?) that corresponds to those symbols, and the right answer automatically pops out at the buttom.
Mr. Rodell states: the lawyers know it would woe unto them, if the non-lawyers ever got wise to the fact that their lives were run by a comparatively small group of men, smart, smooth and smug, the lawyers. It is the lawyers, and not THE LAW that run the show, and it is the lawyers and the lawyer-judges who decide which buttons to push.
Have you ever wondered about all the legal language in a contract or any document that was drafted or prepared by a lawyer? If your lawyer ever told you that they were drawn up for your protection and to keep you out of court, don’t you ever believe a word of it. Legal papers are phrased the way they are, NOT to keep you out of court, but in order to give you a better chance of winning should the affair ever end up in a court room.
In fact, lawyers, with their strange language, no doubt increase the number
of transactions that end up in dispute. If they would let men carry on their
affairs and make agreements in simple and specific terms, in words intelligible
to those involved, there would be fewer mis-understandings and less causes for
grievance. Almost all legal sentences have a way of reading as though they had
been translated from German by some-one with a rather meager knowledge of English.
The sentences are usually too long, awkward with the use of abstract, fuzzy
and clumsy words, which are so essential to the solemn hocus-pocus of THE LAW.
No segment of the English language in use today is so muddy, so confusing, so
hard to pin down to its supposed meaning, as is the language of THE LAW. (the
meaning of the "IS" word as was demonstrated
by the former president may be cited as such an example)
To the non-lawyer, the legal language is, for all intents and purposes a foreign tongue*. Why should people not be privileged to understand precisely and completely any written laws that directly affects them? Since law deals with the ordinary affairs of ordinary human beings, then why should a language be used which they cannot hope to understand? The fact of the matter is, it is for the lawyers’ benefit and not the ordinary person.
* latin.
The various principles and rules that lawyers often use in presenting their language have nothing to do with the solution of the problem. They are called pleading and procedure which encompass the rules as to how the legal game is played. In fact the decisional outcome of a case is very often hung up on some procedural rule. Justice is simply thrown out the window because a lawyer violated some rule. Thus, a man with a legal claim may end up with nothing, except a bill for the lawyer’s fees, simply because his lawyer has been caught using the wrong words. Please understand, this is all part of the tricks of the trade.
However, one of the most startling revelations the author made is, that THE LAW not only can be bought --- but most of the time, it must be bought. Since it has to be bought its results tend to favor those who can afford to hire the services of the smartest lawyers.
This fact coincides with the fact that THE LAW as a whole is a fraud. THE LAW simply could not be bought, if it was the protector of justice, which the lawyers claim it to be.
Most of the business that lawyers handle and live on is made up of matters that never get near a courtroom --- of what is called "Legal Advise". This amounts to casting spells of legal language over the working of business documents so that the documents, if they ever should be dragged into court, will show that regardless of where non-legal justice may seem to lie, THE LAW is pretty clearly on the side that bought the legal advice. The hitch is that as soon as one side resorts to legal advice, the other side has to use it too in self-defense. Thus every-one loses EXCEPT THE LAWYERS, who go merrily on selling THE LAW.
But when a lawyer becomes a judge, he no longer has a direct financial incentive to manipulate THE LAW in favor of the rich people and the big corporations. However, he will usually have spent most of his professional career, before becoming a judge, doing just that. And when he becomes a judge he cannot easily shake off this slant towards THE LAW .
Conditioned by his own past habits of legal speech and thought, the judge will unconciously lean, in laying down THE LAW, towards the side that talks his own brand of legal dialect. What is to be done about the fact that we all are slaves to the hocus-pocus of THE LAW --- and to those who practice this hocus-pocus, the lawyers, the author ponders.
There is only one answer --- which is get rid of the lawyers and throw their THE LAW out of the our system of law. And this is not a plea for anarchy. It would only be necessary to do away with the present manner of phrasing and later interpreting the written laws and with the present manner of settling disputes and solving problems. It would only be necessary to do away with all the legal language and all the legal principles which confuse instead of clarifying the real issues that arise between men. Again, this is not a plea for anarchy; it is merely a plea for common sense.
The LAW, in reaching for certainty with one hand and justice with the other, has fallen between the two into a morass of meaningless and useless language. The sensible thing to do would seem to be by going straight after justice in the settlement of any specific question that comes up for solution. When the written laws cannot or do not contain the answer, SOMEBODY has to make a decision. That decision might better be made on the grounds of plain, unvarnished justice, fairness and humanitarianism than any others.
Today it is the Lawyer-Judges who make such decisions, but the ordinary man knows as much about justice as does the ordinary judge. As a matter of fact, he usually knows more. Training in law does not make a man a better judge of justices. It is likely to make him a worse one. What kind of man should sit in judgement of others? Why not one with common sense knowlege, instead of one with the adeptness in the abracadabra of THE LAW, have the right to sit in judgement of other men’s affairs?
Mr. Rodell goes on to say: “Why should we keep on sacrificing both justice and common sense on the altar of legal principles? Why not just get rid of the Lawyers and their Laws?“ He sees no reason why this should not be done. Of course, Constitutions and laws would have to be re-written without the benefit of Lawyers. Any law that means something definite and tangible in relation to human affairs can be written so that its meaning is plain for all to read and understand.
As God's Law is and is why He prohibits men from legislating:-
Deuteronomy 4:2, King
of kings' s Bible Ye shall not ADD unto the word which
I command you, neither shall ye diminish [ought] from it, that ye may keep the
Commandments of the "I AM" your God which I COMMAND you.
He gives as an example of the phrase, “First Degree Murder“. ---- It makes no sense except in relation to the abstract legal principles which are said to define it. --- "When a court finds that one person has killed another person and believes that the killer deserves to be electricuted" is much more accurate. Why not phrase the statute that way, so that everyone would immediately know what it means?
Of course, there would still have to be courts, even though written laws were made intelligible to all. There would have to be decision-makers to determine the true facts behind any dispute, and to settle any disputes which are not covered by written laws.
Getting rid of the lawyers would mean people who got involved in disputes or got hauled up for alleged violation of some written law would have to tell thier own stories and produce their own proof. Why not let the people really involved in any squable tell and try to prove to the satisfaction of the decision-makers, their own lies?
The abolition of the lawyers and their LAW might eventually lead to the virtual disappearance of courts as we see/know them today. Written law might even be entrusted to a body of experts, to administer it, i.e. doctors, engineers, accountants, etc. Arbitration might be used as a means of settling disputes. Arbitration means nothing more than a voluntary turning over of a dispute for fair settlement to a man or group of men trusted by both sides and equipped to understand the question at issue. All this sounds too good to ever be accomplished.
But Mr. Rodell has presented a picture that many can certainly identify with in having had a situational experience before and many of us are probably aware of what this unusual book says.
However, it is a consoling fact when this comes from of all people --- a lawyer.
