Correspondence re this post:
An Army attorney in Afghanistan writes–
Bravo on your recent post. I’m a Chicago area lawyer who went to law school in my mid-30s and struggled with the issues you raise.
As a reserve officer involuntarily called up and stationed in Afghanistan, banning lawyers from serving in the executive branch sounds good to me.
To look on the bright side, the experience is interesting. I’m the Operations (or Ops for short) Officer for a brigade level organization, which at full strength would have a few thousand soldiers assigned. Over here we’re not at that strength, but we retain the number of slots and authority to fill each slot at the various rank required in the event we do go to full strength. I work directly for the Commander and with subordinate commanders, coordinating mission essential details, such as force protection issues. I am up to my eyeballs in perimeters, guard towers, stand-off distances, “wire”, minefields (leftovers, not new ones by us), concrete and “Hesco” barriers, entry control points, X-ray machines, MP canines, etc. We have people from our organization in 5 locations in Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, so I get to visit each location, inspect their security measures, coordinate improvements, and since nothing really ever happens unless the boss knows about it, report on all these activities and improvements to “CJTF76” (Combined Joint Task Force 76, the 25th Infantry Division headquarters that runs the war here in Afghanistan). […]
As we’re Illinois Guardsmen who have been called up, we’ll be out here a full 12 months. We’re coming up on the 6 month mark, or “hump day” shortly.
[…]I have been an admirer of Lew’s work and that of the Mises Institute for probably the last 15 years, and am an avid reader of LRC, Mises.org. and books by Mises, H3, Rothbard, etc. Aside from a recitation of schools I’ve graduated from and licenses I hold, if I were to give one achievement that would sum up my credentials it would be the fact that my wife and I home schooled our children for nine years before we put them in a private church-run school (I think home schooling says a lot about the willingness to break with the state).
Someone else wntes:
You’re bang on with your “Lawyers: The Problem?” post. As a law student that will resume studies this week, I’ll be subjected to the same collectivist b.s. that the large majority of professors hammer into you from day 1. Speaking as perhaps the lone libertarian in the school it’s an uphill battle against an overwhelming statist crowd (which is by and large the mushy left and “dispicably socialistic”).
An attorney friend writes,
On further reflection, I don’t think that it’s lawyers per se that are the problem. I’ve never believed that law school had much to do with it. Law school just tends to draw a disproportionate no. of people with this particular mental defect. Basically, they’re stupid and mostly ignorant, but since they’re lawyers they’re convinced they must be smart and well educated.
In reply to my question, “Do you think there was a time when lawyers really were smart and educated? And that we lost it and are riding on reputation from days of yore? Or that they never were really smart..?” he replied, “Educated maybe, smart, probably never. The business model of being a lawyer has always been more or less the same sucky model.”
1:13 pm on September 7, 2004
