Dickens on lawyers
"Lawyers appear in 11 of his 15 novels. Some of them even resemble humans. Uriah Heep ('David Copperfield') is a red-eyed cadaver whose 'lank forefinger,' while he reads, makes 'clammy tracks along the page ... like a snail.' Mr. Vholes (“Bleak House”), 'so eager, so bloodless and gaunt,' is 'always looking at the client, as if he were making a lingering meal of him with his eyes.' Most lawyers infest dimly lighted, moldy offices 'like maggots in nuts.' (No, counselor, writers dead since 1870 cannot be sued for libel.)
Dickens knew whereof he spoke. At 15, he was hired as an 'attorney’s clerk,' serving subpoenas, registering wills, copying transcripts; later he became a court reporter. For three formative years he was surrounded by law students, law clerks, copying clerks, court clerks, magistrates, barristers and solicitors who (reborn in his fiction) uttered cheerful sentiments like 'I hate my profession.' His portraits of nearly every London court — Chancery, Divorce, Probate, Admiralty, etc. — are so accurate that one scholar wrote a lively book called 'Charles Dickens as a Legal Historian.' At 32 he filed his first suit against a pirate publisher. Dickens told a friend afterward that 'it is better to suffer a great wrong than to have recourse to the much greater wrong of the law.'"
Read on. I note the author of the piece, Joseph Tartakovsky, is a lawyer.
"[Judge Rakoff] tells me lawyers are scorned because 'they think there are two sides to most stories, while many people think there is just one side: theirs.' "
Another recent NYT article presents contrary evidence: "I have concluded that the death sentence makes no sense to me at this point when you can have life without the possibility of parole," [Ohio Supreme Court Justice Paul E.] Pfeifer said in his most recent public comments, testifying in December in favor a bill to abolish Ohio's law. "I don't see what society gains from that." "Ohio Justice Rejects Death Penalty Law He Wrote," Associated Press (Feb. 15, 2012, 12:27 PM ET) http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2012/02/15/us/AP-US-Death-Penalty-Jaded-Justice.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=law+professor&st=nyt
Justice Pfeifer is the author of Ohio's current death-penalty law. But now that he's changed his mind, he sees no benefit in it whatsoever.
He should have acknowledged the proponents' strongest arguments and then shown, or tried to show, how and why those arguments are wrong, or outweighed by the disadvantages, or both. That would have been interesting.
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My support of the death penalty stems from a belief that certain things done to another human being disqualify you from participation (period). At some point you punch out of humanity. No sense in dragging that out. But then I'm not a lawyer.
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I'm thinking that the death penalty really sucks, but then, I've not tried it yet.
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The death penalty is a pristine example of the hypocritical flaws in liberal thinking. As a simple matter of fact most liberals are against the death penalty but think abortion is not a problem. Are you kidding me?
Ron White captures my thinking perfectly here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgQRgT15f9U
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