motion to bump

passed

motion for appropriate relief

I took a business law class once. Does that count?

at this point of desperation it may. did you pass? did you study the case of the hairy hands?

Don't put Tolstoy in there. He's got a fairly serious level of contempt for the legal profession. (Likes to refer to us as a priesthood, among other things.)

is that literary humor?

It is, and frankly, he's right.

Some future Gibbon writing the story of the Decline and Fall of the American Empire will be sure to heap scorn and blame upon the diploma mills.

I got an A in the class, but there was no talk of hairy hands. It's not in the textbook, either, although after a quick google search it seems it probably should've been mentioned. This was a class at a JC, though, where I imagine there is some effort to keep the textbook as Disneyfied as possible.

I wouldn't say I have a serious contempt for the legal profession. I'm actually one of the few people I know who like lawyers, and I think the judicial system has done the least bad job of the three official branches of government of guaranteeing what freedoms we have left. I've donated money to the ACLU in the past. My stepsister is in her third year of law school right now. That said, there are certainly many things about the legal system I'm not happy about. Mr. Klein and I have hashed out a few of those things on this forum in the past (I recall one was a disagreement about how flexible case law should be, for instance).

And as for the priesthood thing, there are a couple of reasons I use this metaphor. Primarily, I think the general public is kept ignorant of the law; the understanding of it is kept by a fairly small and insular group (I think a basic semester-long class on law ought to be taught in high school). Legal knowledge and the legal system is generally out of reach for John Q. Citizen unless he goes through an intercessor, like people in ancient times would need a priest or soothsayer to read entrails to discern the will of the gods. I also think the legal system has become a little too formalized, where saying the right Latin incantations and following the proper rituals in some cases seems to be more important than being right. The priesthood thing may be a bit disrespectful, but it's not intended to be offensive to the level Mr. Klein seems to be taking it.

If my opinions and insufficient qualifications disqualify me, that's fine. No hard feelings on my end. I'm in enough games already for the moment. I just hate to see six people left in the cold.

If you're worried about the erosion of rights, the last thing you ought to do is support the ACLU. They took the side of corporate speech rights in the whole Citizens United mess.