There may be some place where it is different, in the United States one of the most widespread of motives of those who go into the profession of lawyering is because lawyers get paid a lot. Even a fairly provincial country lawyer will spend a great deal of his professional life in figuring out "billable hours" and getting clients to pay for things like them answering the phone. And, as is the way of the world, with wealth comes the aura of respectability. That's such a bad habit that it even goes for lawyers.
I know there are lawyers who are not entirely motivated by money, there are some who are actually rather admirable - a lot of them go into politics and stop practicing law, some just stop practicing and go into less seedy work because they have more substance to them than that. I rather like some of the lawyers I've known and, even more so, some who got law degrees but gave it up.
William Barr is not such a noble character, he is an elite, rich lawyerly scumbag. His posing on the matter of religion is not matched by any evidence of him suffering the burdens of any morality or moral sense or a belief that enabling injustice will ever result in him suffering for the evil he does. His job, as a lawyer is what the amorality of the law - as it is practiced by his mercenary profession - encourages. He is a fixer, just as Michael Cohen has been, as many of the most famous of lawyers are, he specializes in telling rich people how to do terrible things to People and other living beings and not suffer any consequences for the harm they do. That is what he does, it is his profession as it is the profession of Rudy Giuliani and Alan Dershowitz*l The list of scumbag lawyer enablers of the rich and powerful who want to do evil and profit from it would probably account for most of the insider lawyers of DC, NYC, LA, etc.
That is one of the reasons that elevating lawyers, judges, Supreme Court "justices" as if theirs is any more than a deeply ambivalent profession is as stupid as elevating sports stars or movie actors and directors to a similar status.
The practice of the law is largely to find ways to grant permissions for the clients of lawyers - who can generally pay them - ways to do what they want to do without suffering consequences for the harm they do as they reap the maximum benefits. That is certainly the law as Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, . . . pontificate it. But the less scummy judicial lawyering of those who do not share their overtly evil motives are not free of the same tendencies as the general practice of the law have made habitual. I pointed out yesterday that the majority in the disastrous Buckley v. Valeo would, by today's standard be considered liberals. The declaration that money equals speech is exactly that kind of habitual servicing of the rich that is endemic in the profession of the law.
There is no Constitution or any other law that any human being or group of human beings can devise that will not be prone to the concerted efforts of a group of intelligent fixers and gangsters with law degrees to find loopholes that they can expand into "principles" that they can grow into the permission of their well off clients and prospective clients to get away with theft and everything up to and including murder. It is often on the basis of loftily asserted "principles," many of them derived from the ambiguity of the minor 18th century poetry of the Bill of Rights, that liberal judges have made some of their worst rulings. The ACLU specializes in asserting such disastrously counterproductive "principles" that, in a telling history of their consequences, end up benefiting, primarily, the rich and evil. I came to my conclusions about the real life consequences of these habits of the law in relation to their lofty proclamations of such principle as they refuse to acknowledge the wreckage they've helped produce. That wreckage is best seen in the triumph of Trumpian fascism, brought in on the power of "free speech - free press".
The ACLU in its "non establishment" activity did so much to create the reaction that William Barr joined many another mafia** lawyer in exploiting when he flapped his fat face on "protecting religious freedom" to about as seedy an assemblage of Mammon worshipers as have ever gathered under the cover of "Christianity". None of them are followers or doings of the teachings of Jesus, of Paul, of the Prophets but they all make money off of the suckers they can rope in. I think it is a direct result of all of those stupid manger scene cases, even more so than the school prayer decision, if there's something that can get those guys riled up it's an attack on the secondary Mammonist holiday, commercial, American-style Christmas, the principle commercial holiday in the year. If the stupid ACLU and others had let them carry on the tradition, I'll bet easily most of that opportunity for scum like Barr would never have arisen.
While I'll admit to the principle of "non establishment" and the "wall of separation" in principle, the price of pushing it in practice was far higher than it would be to have not made a fuss about them putting up one of the few non-commercial symbols of Christmas that is used on public property or including numbers with religious content in school concerts. The price of so much of the ACLU style pushing of legal principle has been so high for the left, it could only seem reasonable to lawyers who have spent much time in figuring out "billable hours".
And don't get me started on the price we paid for the porn merchants - so many of them right wing Republicans, apparently - to turn peoples' bodies into disposable commodities.
The law, as it turns out, really is an ass.
* Whatever postures of less sleazy activity the Dersh has done for publicity are many times cancelled out by what else he does.
** I remember when the widow of John Gotti, who Rudy Giuliani used in his climb to fame, pointed out that while her husband had been a gangster, he was no where near as big a gangster as those in the Bush-Cheney crime spree that was going on. I don't know if she's still alive but a part of me hopes she gets to see Giuliani disbarred and behind bars. Something I deeply hope to see for William Barr and so many others, as well.
It is one of the most potent examples of why it is stupid to grant a lawyer like Robert Mueller the kind of phony halo that is granted to people like him that he could be a good buddy of William Barr as Barr was enabling far worse criminality - opening up those loopholes and expanding them with "principles" - than the FBI generally put in jail. The same kind of ersatz respectability surrounds the Supreme Court which is the foremost venue of legal service to the rich and evil.
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