We’ve all complained about the “lawyer” stuff. Too many lawyers. Litigation is ruining the economy, or scaring the doctors into performing unnecessary tests. Trial lawyers are the anti-Christ and all lawyers are bogging us down in court, when we should be in church worshipping Cohen the Columnist or some other deity that we admire.
Sign a simple commercial office lease? No, not until your lawyer and my lawyer and 15 associates at the firm pour over all 165 pages of it, at about $35 trillion per hour.
There. We’ve got that out of our systems. The thing is, every time we criticize lawyers, something out there pops up that just cries out for some lawyerly activism, to clarify, to right a wrong, or at least to make all sides of a strange dispute perspire a bit.
Consider the odd little dispute in Needham, where the high school autocrats suspended 10 girls for participating in a “hazing” of new soccer team members. That is, not just suspended from the team, but also suspended from school.
Apparently, the new girls were blindfolded, put in dog collars, and had pies thrown at them. It might have made an uncomfortable film – especially the blindfold/dog collar part – but something a bit less than felonious assault in the grand scheme of hazing traditions.
Well, it says right there in the student handbook that hazing is prohibited, on the theory that one day it will be a humiliating outfit, and the next day some kid will be thrown in front of a train. We all remember how religiously we read those student handbooks – and how resistant school officials are to teaching discretion and caution, as opposed to simply banning activities altogether.
The Needham parents whose kids were suspended are a bit cranky, but at least for public consumption, the whole matter remains somewhat murky.
The “victims” of the hazing haven’t engaged in torchlight parades to protest their pie-in-the-face humiliation. School officials have mumbled the usual “rules is rules” defense, as they are inclined to do in such cases. And the parents are demanding what in the legal trade might be labeled “due process.”
At least one of the sets of parents has hired an attorney, which, of course, prompted the Boston Globe editorial page to go, “tsk, tsk, why can’t we all just sit down together and work things out?”
Pro, Buono!
But, in truth, there is a long tradition of calling in the lawyers to slog through the mess that is public school education when it comes to such stuff as hazing and “bullying” and the school-administrator instinct to avoid what the Fifth Amendment lovingly calls “due process of law.”
Some school infractions that clearly are not “crimes” subject students to serious penalties, without benefit of the protections that would come, strangely enough, if they were whisked off to jail and true legal protection kicked in.
Last winter in Chicago, 25 middle-school students were arrested as a result of a cafeteria food fight (sort of like throwing pies at the new kids on the team). I didn’t have the patience to follow through on the court proceedings for the misdemeanor charges, but I suspect a really cranky judge and a really bored prosecutor made it all go away – at the behest of an army of defense attorneys.
It’s not just the school kids who are often in need of some lawyerly protection, of course. The mean streets of the big cities are a mess of discretion and murkiness when it comes to such stuff as vagrancy or “disorderly conduct” and other activities that lower real estate values.
Sometimes, you need a lawyer to demand some clarity – a function often provided by newspaper columnists, if there is a God in Heaven.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with bashing lawyers – lawyers and editors are put on this Earth to be targets of derision. But lawyers should by all rights share the scorn they receive with those who actually write the fuzzy, murky, disjointed laws – or write the student handbooks.
I’m going to recommend the dog-collar thing for new writers at Banker & Tradesman. Objections? Irrelevant and immaterial.
