lawyer conflict-of-interest
How do lawyers unofficially and perhaps somewhat surreptitiously influence the content of laws and rules of proceure?
<p>Justice John F. Molloy of Arizona wrote a book titled <em>The Fraternity: Lawyers and Judges in Collusion</em> that was published in 2004.</p>
<p>Among things alleged in that book are that lawyers, in part because of their detailed and extensive knowledge of the system, have ways of unofficially but effectively influencing the content of the law, and they have done so in ways that make lawyers richer. Thus litigants who are told to be thankful for lawyers who help them survive or prevail might actually have avoided difficulties from which their lawyers extricated them if the legal system were not (because of lawyers) so Byzantine.</p>
<p>My question is: What are the specifics of such ways in which lawyers influence the content of the law, with those consequences?</p>

<p>Apart from the fact that lawyers are involved in litigation which can reach appeals courts and therefore be acted on by other lawyers who are working as judges and writing opinions that have the force of law, laws are very frequently drafted by lawyers, on behalf of their bosses (legislators / congressmen) whose primary job is to cause such laws to be enacted through the political process. It's always possible that the dentist-qua-legislator writes the law which is then enacted, but more often than not, someone with actual training in the law passes their eyes over a bill to catch egregious legal errors.</p>

<p>How do you define &quot;unofficially&quot;?</p>
<p>When judges (prior to Melendez v. Diaz) ruled that prosecutors didn't need to call a particular forensic technician to the stand in order to introduce their report, that was certainly an official action.  Backed up with plenty of official legal reasoning about the meaning of the Sixth Amendment's confrontation clause.  As human beings, however, judges almost certainly also realized that requiring forensic technicians to testify would add time to cases, screw up dockets, produce testimony that would be boring for the judge to listen to, rarely make a significant impact on a case, and take technicians away from a backlog of evidence that needs to be examined for other cases.  Does that mean that judges unofficially influenced the law?  Or that they made decisions in part because the results had practical benefits for the majority of lawyers?</p>
<p>When professional organizations adopt codes of ethics for lawyers and legal standards for the practice of law, that is certainly prompted in large part by noble intentions about ensuring people receive adequate representation.  But those rules also happen to have an economically protectionist impact by shielding lawyers from certain types of competition.  Plenty of folks could have a perfectly adequate simple will or estate plan drawn up with legal advice from a paralegal but laws and legal ethics require that a lawyer be involved to give that legal advice.  Sure, there will be cases where a lawyer would catch something that the paralegal missed and there will be plenty of estates that are complicated enough that you'd need to retain a lawyer.  But lawyers don't have to worry about that sort of competition.  Of course, lawyers aren't alone here-- doctors have influence over regulations that protect them from certain types of competition from nurses, dentists from dental technicians, cosmetologists and barbers have licensing boards that protect them from random people that can cut hair without hundreds or thousands of hours of training, etc.</p>
