Miss Gillard goes to Washington ... Trousering $500 a minute ... Lovely send-offs for Spigs ... Feds reluctant to run with RICO ... Kerry O'Brien's multiple question technique ... Evan Whitton at large
Gillard and Congress: standing ovationOur not quite yet erstwhile Prime Minister, Miss Julia Gillard, 49, recently (March 10) addressed a US Congress heavily papered with bribers (lobbyists), student bribe-takers (interns), and passing layabouts.
An amanuensis muttered: "You want mawkish? I can do mawkish."
Honourable members, I should first inform you that Australia is a fairly large island somewhere in the south Pacific. I pointed it out on an atlas yesterday to your great Afro-Irish President.
Like me, Mr O'Blahblahblahma, is a lawyer, but we can't help that. [Pause for laughter; 15 percent of Washington are shysters.]
As a little gel in Australia, I watched in wonder as America put a man on the moon, or at any rate on a sound stage in Idaho. And I thought: AMERICANS CAN DO ANYTHING. [Pause for standing ovation.]
My distinguished predecessors, Pig Iron Bob and Jackie the Lackey, were loyal little friends of America. [Pause for tepid applause.]
You will be pleased to learn that they sent token forces to your hugely profitable, if not entirely successful, wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. And I thought: America can persuade dim bulbs to do ANYTHING. [Pause for applause.]
And if you want to get into a shooting war with China, this little gel, or at any rate our doomed lads, will be with you all the way. [Pause for prolonged standing ovation.]
Fred Rodell lives!
Fred Rodell: Woe Unto YouA Belfast correspondent, Joe Ferris, of VLPS (Victims of the Legal Profession Society) advises that HALT (Help Abolish Legal Tyranny) has usefully put a selection of law prof Fred Rodell's writings online.
The selection should be required reading at any half-way decent law school. It is available at fredrodell.com.
Fred (1907-80) became a member of the Yale law faculty in 1933. In Goodbye to Law Reviews (Virginia Law Review, 1936), he reported:
"There are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content. That, I think, about covers the ground."
In his 1939 book, Woe Unto You, Lawyers! he wrote: "[The legal trade] is nothing but a high-class racket."
What did he mean by racket? Let's ask the Macquarie:
A loud noise, esp. of a disturbing or confusing kind; din; uproar; clamour or noisy fuss. [That sounds like the adversary system.] ... Social excitement, gaiety, or dissipation. [That sounds like any Chief Justice's Five O'Clock Follies.]
But no one could possibly believe he meant, "an organised illegal activity such as the extortion of money by threat or violence from legitimate businessmen; a dishonest scheme, trick, etc".
Or could they? See next item.
How to trouser $500 a minute, and not go to jail
In Lawyer Barons: What Their Contingency Fees Really Cost America, (556 pp. Cambridge, 2011), Yeshiva law prof Lester Brickman mentions US judges "collaborating" with lawyers. Does that mean "colluding"?
Prof Brickman writes:
"Over the past forty-five years, due largely to contingency fee financing, tort lawyers have increased their incomes in real terms by more than 1000 percent.
In speciality areas, such as products liability, medical malpractice, airline crash litigation, and mass torts, lawyers can realize effective hourly rates of thousands of dollars an hour- even as much as $30,000 an hour."
That means torties can trouser a lousy $500 a minute.
J. Spig hangs up the cue
Spigs: retiringAfter 13 glorious years, Jim Spigelman CJ (NSW), 65, will retire in May.
Who could forget the huzzas from lawyers and judges when he declaimed on appointment?
"[The legal] profession has an ethical dimension and values justice, truth and fairness ... The common law and the adversary system - a manifestation of the power of Socratic dialogue - is [!] one of the greatest mechanisms for the identification of truth and the maintenance of social stability that has ever been devised."
It is to J. Spig's vast judicial credit that he fell into error only seven times in those 50 words.
Company directors were ecstatic last December when Jim and two other appellate beaks ruled that seven James Hardie directors could resume their normal pleasures without any accompanying blot. Asbestos victims were rather less enraptured.
Jim, Margaret Beazley and Roger Giles overturned Justice Ian Gzell's finding that the directors broke the law when they gave the nod to a misleading public statement.
The directors said a new a trust to pay asbestos victims was "fully funded". It turned out to be about $1.5 billion short of fully funded.
Bret Walker, perennial long shot for high judicial office, sent Jim off nicely in the SMH (March 19):
"He has worked more effectively than anyone for the better administration of justice ... From day one he did it in terms of organising the court's business, modernising rules and practices and ... showing his decided preference for efficient, better-value-for-money justice."
Ignorance is bliss. Jim and Bretty have presumably never heard of Bonaparte's value-for-money system, in which trials take a few hours instead of a few years.
Libya plan miscues
Belloc wrote in 1932 (Napoleon, Cassell): "The task before us today is the re-uniting of Europe."
Europe and England would have been united in 1805 (and J. Spig and B. Walker would have a cost-effective system), except that Admiral Pierre Charles Jean Baptiste Silvestre de Villeneuve (1763-1806) was permanently asleep at the wheel.
It took the Second World War to finally convince Europe that union was the only way out of the endless cycle of killing.
A task today is to achieve a similarly peaceful and productive Middle East/North Africa Union, including Israel and Iran.
Monty: heading to Libya in 1942When the revolution in Libya began, I suggested to a Jerusalem organ, Haaretz, how Israel could take the first step to union.
With the blessing of the Arab League, Israel could send a column across North Africa - a damn sight quicker than Montgomery and his pretty young adjutants did in 1942-43 - to take out Gaddafi,
The opportunity was lost.
Organised criminals still safe to prey on everyone
Anyone even mildly interested in law and order knows:
- Organised crime has two faces, the Mob and the far more dangerous white collar chaps: the price fixers, tax evaders, and inside traders who steal billions from the defenceless, and the corrupt judges and their bagmen who rob citizens of justice.
- An asinine rule which conceals evidence of a pattern of criminal activity has left millions of those lovely types free to prey on victims for 117 years.
- For 30 years, the US RICO exception to the rule has been putting away Mob bosses and corrupt judges and lawyers for 30 years.
Nonetheless, a delegation from the forerunner of the present federal parliamentary Committee on Law Enforcement girdled the globe - Canada, US, Italy, Austria, UK, and the Netherlands – in April-May 2009 to find out how to deal with organised criminals.
The delegation reported in June 2009 that US Department of Justice officials had told them that RICO has been highly successful against organised crime.
All of which makes it curious that the current committee does not seem to be interested in pursuing RICO (Justinian, February 25).
I asked the committee's secretary, T. Watling:
"Please inform me who decided that the committee on law enforcement is unlikely to inquire into the utility of a rule which obliges prosecutors to deceive jurors and protects serial rapists and organised criminals."
Watling did not answer the question. He wrote:
"The committee considered your emails and decided to accept them as correspondence. This means that they will be available for the committee's further information should the need arise, but will not be published."
Only organised criminals, serial rapists and lawyers gain from keeping the rule against pattern evidence.
So why keep it? I think we should be told, perhaps by someone on the current committee:
Senators Steve Hutchins (Chairman, Lab NSW), Brett Mason (Lib Qld), Steve Fielding (Family First Vic), Stephen Parry (Lib Tas), Helen Polley (Labor Tas), and lower House members Sharon Grierson (Lab Newcastle, NSW), Christopher Hayes (Lab Fowler NSW), Michael Hill (Lib Cecil Hills WA), Russell Matheson (Lib Camden NSW), Moira Vamvakinou (Lab Broadmeadows Vic).
The O'Brien solution
O'Brien: "... because"Kerry O'Brien, 65, is enjoying a merciful release after 15 years as editor and anchor of a current affairs programme put on by the public broadcaster.
Mr O'Brien's legacy - and it is a great one - is his remarkable knack of asking three or four questions in the same sentence, with a "because" or two thrown in. Even the radio people do it.
As even the humblest herpetoid of the law knows, you ask one question at a time.
The solution is simple and quick: have a little man tick off the questions and dock the reptiles $100 for every extra question and every "because".