More lawyers needed?

The lead article (March) noted that the percentage of attorneys in the California legislature had decreased from 48 percent to 18 percent over the past 38 years. The question was whether the state’s problems would be better solved if there were more attorneys in the legislature. Then, you turn the page and read that attorneys running for the board of the California State Bar were suing each other over who lived where. We need more lawyers? Really?

Thomas Owen McElmeel
Seattle, Wash.

Unions control Sacramento

It makes no difference whether California legislators have law degrees. It is the public employee unions that run the state. I’m sure they have plenty of attorneys on the payroll.

George D. Straggas
Newport Beach

No monopoly on wisdom

In Holly Fujie’s column (February), she states that it is unfortunate that the number of lawyer-legislators has declined. I disagree. Lawyers represent 17.5 percent of the state legislature, still far higher than our numbers in the general population. Further, in a time when California’s budget deficit has reached the staggering figure of $42 billion, and is certainly the most critical issue for California, we could use more legislators who understand economics.

While I did learn a great deal about how to read and interpret statutes and court cases in law school, I was not instructed on classical economist principles that would help California resolve this problem.

The idea that lawyers should compose a majority or even a super-majority of the legislature ignores the fact that laws should be made based upon the experience, wisdom, insights and common sense of the population. While I think that lawyers are indeed great people, we don’t have a monopoly on information, common sense or wisdom.

Michael Scott Gordon
Los Angeles

Unsportsmanlike conduct

Since I mope geriatrically on inactive status, it could be argued I lack standing to bring this toothless complaint. Nevertheless, even my languid corpuscles were morbidly riled by the Journal’s quite unseemly front page celebration of the disciplinary unit’s Feb. 11 hat trick. Especially as one corner of it was in the matter of the Santa Clara once-and-probably-future DA. Well, thanks for running his picture, so we’ll be on guard should we encounter him in some dark alley or low dive.

But, considering what’s done to non-prosecutorial miscreants out there for a whole lot less, how can you possibly boast that the Big DB was not handed down. Grand scale cheating and concealment at the very center of the system, but “strong good character evidence” in mitigation?? What? Did he present letters from Gordon Liddy? John Yoo? Alberto Gonzales?

Daniel Zara
Winnetka

Answered prayers

Re: Arlo H. Smith discipline (March). In my 50 years as a member of the State Bar, I have encountered similar conduct and wished and prayed that the bankruptcy judge, the trial judge, the State Bar or someone would see what was clearly happening and have the intestinal fortitude to take some action.

And now, I’m happy to say, my wishes and prayers have been answered. A bankruptcy judge has ordered sanctions of $16,000 (which I’ll wager hasn’t been paid) and the State Bar, in viewing the conduct and the fact that Mr. Smith has only three prior counts of misconduct (resulting in a 1991 disciplinary action), has now been put on probation. Baaaad boy!!

Thank God that the members of the public and the bar may now rest easy this night.

Jack D. Scott
Rancho Santa Fe

Speaks for itself

Turn on the television and what does one see? Inter alia, one sees electronic ambulance chasing. And in our credulity, we wonder why the public has such a low opinion of lawyers. Res ipsa loquitur.

W.P. Clancey
San Marcos

Tighten our belts

I read with interest your front page articles on the economic downturn and its effect on the State Bar’s budget (February). I recall that each time the bar suffers a reversal of funds, it immediately waves the prospect of reduced services in our faces.

I’d like to suggest a shocking and totally novel idea: the State Bar might cut salaries and benefit packages of its huge army of employees. That they should share in the same belt tightening as the members who pay their salaries (indeed, many members have no benefit package) is something I know the bar would be loathe to consider. Your articles also fail to recognize the widespread use of the salary and hour reductions by employers across the country as a means of avoiding layoffs.

Margot J. Champagne
Washington, D.C.

Out of touch

The articles on the economy show just how far out of touch the State Bar is with its members. Both articles focus on the State Bar’s financial problems instead of the obvious cause of those problems: the economy and the financial downturn in the amount paid for legal services. The reason everyone knows, except apparently the bar, that attorneys are not paying dues like they used to and that not as much money is being held in trust accounts is because many, if not most, attorneys are not making the money they used to make or, even worse, are not making any money at all.

I, like many other attorneys, have had to change the way I do business. I had to decrease my retainer and I am doing more work for less money. To increase bar dues now, when many attorneys are decreasing their fees, would be an act of cruelty.

Bob McCoy
Ontario

Someone’s happy

I take a perverse satisfaction knowing your viability to survive the century is in question (February). I’ll be watching till I die.

Still suspended after all these years.

John Rubens
Los Angeles

Careful what you wish for

Peter Zadek posits that the solution to State Bar budget woes is to simply fine lawyers found guilty of disciplinary violations to fund the cost of maintaining the disciplinary system (March). Not so fast. Can you figure out a financial structure to have enough cash on hand in advance to pay for the staff to investigate and bring the discipline cases? Your plan would have to include funds to collect fines from the guilty attorneys. Good luck keeping that part of your new budget in the black. It strikes me that more often than not, attorneys get into disciplinary difficulty when they are in financial difficulty; what happens if they don’t have any money with which to pay fines? And in cases where there are some monies, but not enough to both reimburse victims and repay the bar for the costs of the disciplinary proceeding, who do you think should get paid first?

Not a bad idea if it were workable, but it is not. If the solution were as simple as you make it out to be, it would have been in place long ago. Bar discipline serves an important function for all lawyers, as well as the public, and properly funding it is a necessity, not a luxury.

Jeanne Elias
Waitsfield, Vermont

Were we kidding?

I had to read Diane Curtis’ article, “Cultural differences: New defense tactic?” (February) twice to ensure that I was not being spoofed. Disclosure: I have not read Professor Renteln’s book, but based on the article, my response to her proposal would be an extended version of Seth Meyer’s occasional pieces on Saturday Night Live titled, “REALLY!” as the article all but invites “pie-in-the-face” sarcasm and ridicule. This is a terrible idea, because it implies that victims of these crimes are less worthy of American justice than native-born Americans.

Who, and to what extent, would be allowed to make a “cultural imperative” defense? I am sure that even in Mexico people are not permitted to go around shooting each other because their mother’s honor has been insulted. Among certain groups, spousal and familial abuse is common; do we tell those people that it is okay to beat your wife and children?

Among others, drinking and fighting are the subject of story and song; do they get a pass too? What about spitting on the sidewalk? That may be emblematically cultural for Asians as well. What about public education and the obligation of parents to educate their children?

Worst of all, this type of thinking panders to every negative stereotype imaginable and the blowback may be horrific. This will be seen as an affirmative action program for social deviants based upon their ethnicity.

Right wing talk show nut cases will have a field day. Drunk in public? Well, the defendant is Irish, and we all know how these people are. Sexual harassment? The guy is Italian, so what do you expect? And we all know what Jews, Blacks, Russians, Indians, Koreans, etc., are capable of.

Life is hard enough on immigrants, legal or not; no purpose is served by suggesting that if they get into trouble here, they’re entitled to special consideration because they would not necessarily have been punished in their homelands for doing the same thing, and which they knew to be wrongful there, too.

The last thing we need is an apologist for culturally sanctioned mayhem. Killing people unlike ourselves is as ancient as civilization, and around the world it occurs with a ferocity that is sickening to watch.

The fact that people in some cultures find it difficult to relinquish abusive practices they bring with them from their homelands is no excuse whatsoever against criminal conviction and punishment here. I have no doubt as to Professor Renteln’s sincerity in the rightness of her proposal, but sincerity does not make this sort of nonsense any less so.

Arthur R. Silen
Davis

Live by our rules

Rather than complicating an already complicated criminal justice system (and by way of correlation other parts of the justice system such as family law), by attempting to accommodate this behavior to any degree, I think there is a better solution. If any individual wants to live in a society which accepts, as part of its culture, conduct that is unacceptable here, then he or she should stay in the country where such conduct is acceptable.

Ms. Renteln says all she needs to say in stating, “when in Rome do as the Romans do.”

We have enough to deal with in this country without incorporating unacceptable cultural norms from other countries into our jurisprudence.

In summary — if you want to live here, live by our rules.

Steven E. Briggs
Newport Beach

A threat to the system

Diane Curtis’ piece should awaken fear in even the most culturally complacent that the left’s rhetoric surrounding concepts of multiculturalism is seeping into professional institutions, such as law enforcement, charged with preserving and protecting our liberty. The academy’s work in this area should be welcome news to murderers, child rapists and thieves, seeking just the right social experiment to befuddle the jurors sitting in their prosecutions.

The laws of this land should be squarely based in its own historical culture of liberty. I am of the opinion that judicial relativism threatens our society and it would have been nice to see a counterpoint in Curtis’ story.

Adam Lee
Washington, D.C

Repugnancy tests

As an African-born attorney who immigrated to the United States as an adult, I read with interest Diane Curtis’ article. Being a product of the British Colonial legacy, I have great respect for the British idea of not condemning every African custom or social practice. Local customs and social practices were subjected to “repugnancy tests” before they were either upheld or outlawed by the colonial courts. The courts continued to apply the test even after the British left.

The simple test was not whether the customs or practices violated British laws, but whether they were repugnant to natural justice, equity and good conscience. For example, while outlawing the practice of sentencing a deposed chief to death, they upheld “woman-to-woman” marriage whereby a married woman without a child could “marry” another woman to bear children for the husband. This is our 21st century surrogate moms!

We immigrants are the products of our environments and neither law nor equity has the power to wipe clean our memory and repartition our brain. Subjecting cultural defenses to “repugnancy tests” is not a bad idea.

Eugene Emeka Maduewesi
San Francisco