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The Civil Justice System 

The concept of freedom, equality of opportunity and dignity for all citizens is the basis and bulwark of our national pride and our nation's strength. America's passion for equal justice is the unifying force that binds us together.  However, experience has taught us that these human rights are not secure unless they can be made good by a lawyer in a court of law. In a free market economy the same is true of our rights as consumers, workers and stockholders.

The powerful, whether state or corporation, will always represent a threat to the rights and interests of the average citizen unless the law provides protection. However enlightened, the law is powerless to vindicate the right of the individual without an independent bar of Trial Lawyers.  It often seems as if lawyers and the judicial system itself are held in low esteem in our country. Such ill repute has doubtless been brought on, in some measure, by bad lawyers and incompetent judges. However, much more of it is quite literally manufactured by special interests that wish to be free of the constraints that the law places upon their own conduct.

It is a measure of the success of our system, and its ability to bring the powerful to heal that such organized efforts have been mounted to slander the trial bar. When accusations are made about greedy lawyers, it is useful to consider where the claim is coming from. It is invariably some interest that is seeking to remove itself from accountability under the law, that does not want its conduct reviewed by a jury of ordinary citizens free of concerns for political patronage or commercial influence.

Often in the context of derisive humor, we hear the Shakespearean quote, "First, we will kill all the lawyers." This quote is never put into context. Dick the Butcher, who uttered those words, was a scoundrel and a rogue. The lawyers he would kill were the members of society standing firm and holding the line against chaos and tyranny.  Today Dick the Butcher takes the form of "think tanks" funded by the liability insurance industry, pharmaceutical, and chemical manufacturers and others who would be freed of their responsibility to consider the consumers interest, not just their profits. Such entities are dedicated to spewing propaganda against the civil justice system. Their goal is to undermine the simple but foundational values that are the common law and to replace them with restrictive legislation purchased with political favors.

Recently, Americans have been shocked by the extent of corruption that has been revealed in the executive suits of the corporate world. They are shocked at what corporate leaders have been willing to do to add further to already bountiful even obscene personal wealth. However, this has been no revelation to those of us who labor in the civil justice system. While rarely drawing attention, the trial bar's stock in trade is discovering and rectifying the consequences of corporate negligence, greed and fraud. From insurance companies and financial institutions that bilk the old and unsophisticated, to corporations that sell dangerous vehicles with knowledge of design defects because the market cycle demands a new product on time.

It is well and good to talk about and encourage morality and ethics in corporate conduct, but society should never bank exclusively on such self-restraint. The genius of the free market system is that it harnesses the inevitable impulse to pursue self-interest. This, however, is also its great weakness. There will always be those, especially in the corporate setting, that will have trouble discerning the proper limits of this pursuit. This means that we must have a system of justice that will bring the excessive pursuit of self-interest to account.

It is the nature of the corporate entity that no single individual is responsible for corporate conduct. As we have seen, even the CEO can make a plausible denial. Only a system of justice that makes a reckoning a probability will provide the moral corporate officer the rational to insist upon restraint in corporate behavior. Adam Smith's invisible hand must in fact be a pair of hands, if society is to uniformly benefit, one to do the nations commerce, the other to wash the former of its excesses and transgressions.

Those who would "kill the lawyers" which is to say the common law, need find replacements. Who will protect the poor, the injured, the victims of negligence and discrimination? Who will be the champions of those victims of corporate abuse or bureaucratic tyranny? If those who would "kill the lawyers" offer any substitute at all, it is a witless and powerless bureaucracy that can be manipulated by the interest involved in ways that a jury cannot.

Or course, not all destructive conduct is corporate in nature. Much of what the civil justice system addresses is individual carelessness. Even here, however, there is societal purpose. Especially in a free society, every citizen has responsibilities to others in the community. Every day the civil justice system passes judgment on the conduct of individuals. Without it we would be left only with the crude and clumsy hand of criminal justice to define the limits of proper conduct.

Our civil judicial system and the common law upon which it is based make it possible for our diverse, complex democratic free market society to function. As long as we have an independent judiciary who, hopefully, won their spurs in the courtroom before ascending the bench, so long as we have the "12 good men and true" and so long as we have trial lawyers, throughout the width and breadth of our land, in small communities and great cities, who stand ready to do combat and to spill their blood on the courtroom floor for their clients - rich or poor, black or white, whatever their persuasion - our rights as American citizens will be secure.