I don’t care to label him, and as I said, what I find ridiculous are the labels: false dichotomies like red vs blue.

Do people require more awakening before they figure it out?

I could say the same thing about associates that are doctors.

The Doctor Class and the Lawyer class have more in common than it might seem.

Many are misinformed, but believe with religious fervor that they are “correct”.

You have made many blanket negative statements (very negative) here about lawyers, for many years. I’m sure you don’t hate every lawyer in the world, but you dislike lawyers intensely and you bring it up quite a bit.

So, big deal that 90% of the legislators you personally have met are lawyers. That means nothing and does not justify your statement that the “great overwhelming majority” of legislators are lawyers. It’s not even close.

As for your question about who writes the laws, why don’t you try Googling it? Seriously, instead of making assumptions (like the one you made about what percentage of members of Congress are lawyers), why not just find out?

Have you ever read a statute? I would imagine you have. You probably have found—as with just about any legal document—that it’s long, persnickety, and very detailed and complex. Why do you think that is? Do you think it’s because lawyers are persnickety a-holes who like to use “legalisms” to confuse everyone else and obfuscate what they’re doing? Or do you think there may be a reason laws are that way?

You’re a doctor. Medical texts can be quite complex, too, and laypeople understand why that is. At least, most laypeople do. People go to doctors because they are specially trained in a certain field of expertise.

Well, someday you should try writing a law and see how it turns out. You might find that unless you spell everything out in exhaustive detail, and try to make everything crystal crystal clear (or as clear as possible), the law won’t cover what you want it to and won’t achieve the goals you want, or will be impossible to understand. You might even find you need a lawyer—quelle horreur!—to help you write it.

Lawyers are specialists in writing laws and interpreting laws (among other things), and dealing with legal language in general. Legal language has a purpose and its complexity has a purpose. It is not arbitrary. It is not something just anyone can suddenly do, although we all speak English and we all use words. Statutes need to cover all bases and be almost obsessively thorough. And even then, there are always matters that are open to interpretation—that’s what judges do. Or, sometimes, further legislation is needed in order to clarify or close an unforeseen loophole.

But members of Congress don’t ordinarily write legislation. They ordinarily use the attorneys of this office. The legislators make suggestions as to what is needed (sometimes based on special interest groups they are trying to please, such as lobbyists). And each state has a similar process that goes on.

That is the case with statutory law. Common law is made by courts (judges) based on precedent and interpretation of already existing law, and has its own lengthy tradition.

Legislators do not write bills. They would have time to do nothing else if they did that—plus, since they are for the most part not lawyers, they would do a lousy job of it.

I have never draped a “virtue blanket” over the law. I have said many times that the law is flawed, but it’s the best system we have ever come up with. I’m not in the business or the habit of seeing virtue blankets where they don’t exist. I have studied law and thought about it a good deal. I had no particular preconception about law before I studied it, but as I studied it I became very impressed with the difficulty of devising and implementing a system of law and making it clear. I think the truth is that our system is about as good as it gets. And that’s no “virtue blanket.” The entire process is flawed and always will be.

Read the quote about Justice here, though, for the ideal and the goal.

You simply don’t know what you’re talking about, Frog.

See this, written in 2012:

As you can see, the share of senators who were lawyers peaked at 51 percent in the 92nd Congress, which was in session in 1971 and 1972. It’s now at 37 percent. Banking and business have gradually been absorbing a larger share of the Senate, going from a low of 11.46 percent of senators in the 79th Congress (1945-46) to 20 percent in today’s Senate.

And not surprisingly – given changes in the overall composition of the economy – agriculture contributes far fewer senators today than it did in the mid-20th century.

The patterns are similar for the House of Representatives, although the share of lawyers there has fallen even more sharply: [a chart follows, showing the trend]

Lawyers account for 23.91 percent of today’s House, down from a high of 42.56 percent in the 87th Congress (1961-62). Today there are also about as many representatives who previously worked in banking and business as there are lawyers, with bankers and businessmen making up 21.38 percent of the House.

The chart doesn’t go back to the earliest days of the republic, but I can almost guarantee that the people who made the laws then were not predominantly lawyers, either, although of course some of them were.

And then there are state legislatures, which pass state laws. In state legislatures, the percentage of lawyers is even lower. Here’s a survey of all 50 states, taken in 2015 (there’s a chart there, too). Nowhere does it even begin to approach 50%; even in states with a lot of lawyers, it is way under that:

Lawyers haven’t vanished from every statehouse. In seven states – New Jersey, Louisiana, Virginia, South Carolina, Texas, Florida and Mississippi – the percentage of lawyer-legislators remains high, at more than 25 percent.

It is highest in New Jersey, where 36 of 120 legislators, or 30 percent, are lawyers, according to the Stateline-NCSL survey…

The states with the smallest share of lawyers generally are ones that pay lawmakers little for serving. In New Hampshire, where legislators earn $100 a year, just 13 of 424 legislators, or 3 percent, are lawyers, the lowest percentage in the nation.

But not every low-paying state has a dearth of lawyers. That may be because lawyers’ flexible schedules allow them to serve, said Peverill Squire, a political science professor at the University of Missouri. Squire has been studying the makeup of state legislatures for more than three decades.

In Texas, for example, legislative pay is among the lowest in the nation at $7,200 a year. Yet, 27 percent of legislators are lawyers.

If you look at the chart, which gives an average for all state legislatures, the average percentage of lawyers in state legislatures was 22% in 1976, and it steadily declined until in 2015 it had reached 14.4%. In contrast, the percentage of business people was 36.3% in 1976 and 29.5% in 2015.

And in the past, there were not so many lawyers in general in terms of percentage of the population, so my guess is that in the 1800s, for example, the percentages of lawyers in Congress and state legislatures was even lower than it is today.

So, legislatures in the US have a variety of people in them and—unlike what you seem to think—do not consist of a “great overwhelming majority” (your words) of lawyers. Nor have they ever. By the way, legislatures are elected by the people, and the people can throw legislators out if they don’t like them and replace them with others.

Judges are usually lawyers because most states require it (see this for a list of the states that don’t always require it), for the simple reason that judges must be familiar with the law (both statutory and common, the latter of which is traditional and cumulative and deals with precedent), which they interpret and administer and do not make (unless they are liberal activist judges, in which case their decisions are based on their liberalism rather than the fact that they are lawyers).

Laws are not arbitrary, either, and judicial decisions are most definitely not arbitrary (especially by non-activist judges). They reflect the mores of a society, but in the end they are also ultimately based on natural law in this country at least. You can find legal scholars who disagree with that position, but I am of the school that agrees with it:

Robert Lowry Clinton argues that the U.S. Constitution rests on a common law foundation and the common law, in turn, rests on a classical natural law foundation.

You can read that whole Wiki entry; it’s long and complex, as are the arguments about all of this.

As I said before, I know that you hate and despise lawyers. I think your entire point of view is colored by that. But it would be good to try to get your facts right; things such as what percentage of Congress and state legislative bodies are made up of lawyers are easily obtainable facts.

So lawyers write the law.

It is widely agreed by both Left and Right that judges, those supposedly objective figures, all lawyers, are biased.
Example: “The [Vox Labor Day] opinion article argued that the decline in unionization has harmed the well being of American workers thanks to a judicial system that favors employers.” (From Washington Free Beacon today)

The law is what judges say the law is. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals however votes en banc very differently from the Third Circuit on issues of constitutionality. Different individual judges reach different conclusions on the same matter, as Federal District judicial decisions during the Trump era have shown. That is in effect geographically separated debates.

Thus, our law is not Natural Law, but human law. And that law, with a small L, is achieved by debate, argument, and wrangling. Which takes me back to my original point: Law is a debate between lawyers, and the better debater/jury persuader wins.

The players (lawyers) reflect on the game. It is often ugly. I will not give it more dignity than it deserves.

Laws and Lawyers are found all over the planet. They do not as a rule defend mankind from the state of Hobbesian chaos.

You’re describing the business and practice of law. I’m describing its philosophical underpinnings, which are a codification and detailed operationalism of natural law.

I don’t think you understand what’s behind the law. You hate lawyers, I know, and that colors your perspective of law.

And by the way, even the practice and business of law is NOT just a debate. That “debate” is not just a question of arguing. A lawyer follows certain hoary rules that have developed in order to attempt to help arrive at justice and to protect the accused, which is another philosophical decision our legal system makes (protecting the rights of the individual accused, that is, and following certain rules that apply to everyone, which is the principle of equality in the eyes of the law). The idea of the adversary system (which you describe as a “debate”) is that each person must follow rules and the judge has the final say on that, as an objective expert (hopefully, anyway) in the rules and in applying them equally and fairly. The rules include the precedents set by hundreds of years of decisions from similar courts. The idea (often not achieved, but it’s the idea and it’s the goal) is that each lawyer will do his or her level best to present the case of his/her client, and if the lawyers are evenly matched and competent, then justice will prevail.