Hello world!

This blog is an experiment – an effort not just to inform, comment or discuss but to act.

The predicate is that the legal system in the United States is broken.  The justification for that predicate is:  a) personal observation over many years as an attorney; b) admissions, confessions, laments, tirades, wails, screams and cries from many other attorneys serving in many different, and sometimes surprisingly lofty capacities; c) depressing statistics on wrongful convictions; d) a steady stream of horror stories coming out of the legal system, day in and day out, primarily on the worldwide web but occasionally surfacing in the mainstream press.

That said, and with so many other blogs from lawyers chronicling, documenting, complaining, exposing and so on, some of them doing all that with style, black humor and other forms of panache, what’s different about this one?

Well.

This one will attack the problem at its root:  judges.  Judges favor the government in criminal cases.  They favor insurance companies and banks – and the government again – in civil cases.  Put simply, they favor the more powerful litigants and their attorneys over the weaker litigants and their attorneys.  More simply yet, they are the ultimate apologists for the establishment and the status quo, precisely because their whole publicly perceived raison d’etre is the opposite.

So, what to do?  Personally, I’ve had enough complaining, especially when it comes from lawyers. We are players in the system; if it’s broken, it’s at least partly our fault.

I propose to field reports (anonymity protected) from criminal defense lawyers and other disfavored litigants’ attorneys from anywhere in the United States concerning outrageous judicial conduct – not the kind that makes it into the mainstream press, like personal or sexual misconduct, but the routine, everyday dishonest, biased decision making that hurts those attorneys and their clients, resulting in wrongful convictions or other forms of justice denied.

Then, based upon criteria that I may or may not divulge in the future, I will decide if any of those reports justify a boycott of the judge involved by other criminal defense and/or independent attorneys.

Then I will use this blog to call for a “strike”:  that is, to call upon all attorneys in the geographic area to refuse to appear in the courts of that area.

This is something attorney associations won’t do.  It is something other lawyer-bloggers won’t do.

Will it matter?  Will anyone even pay attention, to say nothing of actually engaging in a strike?  If anyone did, would it ever be an effective remedy for what ails the system?  That’s the experiment.

One thing is for certain:  nothing else is working.  I mean, there are judicial conduct commissions and committees and so on, but please.

Anyway, that’s what this is about.  I’m going to give it a while, see if anything comes of it.  I’ll post about other things I’m interested in, too, but I’ll try to stay focused.

Thanks for reading.

Atticus