When this Covid-19 thing resolves itself, we’ll have to sit down over a meal and discuss how the legal profession in the nineteenth century got sidetracked by an exploding technology and a corporate culture well on its way to destroying the regulatory state charter system which the Founders had established to contain the corporate abuse they so feared; distracted and diverted from its true role of defending the Constitution and civil liberties of citizens. “American lawyers were–if the language be not too strong–hoodwinked into contending that in this country ancient law could be embraced without a tincture of its feudal connotations” [Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War, page 213]. This in no way is a reflection or a judgment upon individuals who like yourself have chosen to practice law, which is at least as noble a profession as medicine, teaching, or psychotherapy; the plain fact is, individuals and individual decisions simply do not enter into our major problems, which are systemic. It is only libertarians, utilitarian pragmatists, four-flushers, and fascists who want us to believe that all socio-political problems are solely the result of a concatenation of individual bad decisions and opinions, to be relieved by right-thinking and re-education into the wonderful world of corporate capitalist ideology (or corporate socialist ideology, if the labor-left contingency regains power), thereby eliminating the need for governance and political authority (for which read: legitimacy).
