The Fraternity: Lawyers and Judges in Collusion

Below is an article written by John F. Molloy who was elected to the Arizona Court of Appeals, where he served as chief justice and authored more than 300 appellate opinions. Molloy wrote the final Miranda decision for the Arizona Supreme Court.

This is an insider's observation of his profession. This should confirm what you have suspected all along about the legal industry.

The Fraternity:
Lawyers and Judges in Collusion
....Law loses its way
By John F. Molloy

When I began practicing law in 1946, justice was much simpler. I joined a small Tucson practice at a salary of $250 a month, excellent compensation for a beginning lawyer. There was no paralegal staff or expensive artwork on the walls.

In those days, the judicial system was straightforward and efficient. Decisions were handed down by judges who applied the law as outlined by the Constitution and state legislatures. Cases went to trial in a month or two, not years. In the courtroom, the focus was on uncovering and determining truth and fact.

I charged clients by what I was able to accomplish for them. The clock did not start ticking the minute they walked through the door.

Looking back

The legal profession has evolved dramatically during my 87 years. I am a second-generation lawyer from an Irish immigrant family that settled in Yuma. My father, who passed the Bar with a fifth-grade education, ended up arguing a case before the U.S. Supreme Court during his career.

The law changed dramatically during my years in the profession. For example, when I accepted my first appointment as a Pima County judge in 1957, I saw that lawyers expected me to act more as a referee than a judge. The county court I presided over resembled a gladiator arena,
with dueling lawyers jockeying for points and one-upping each other with calculated and ingenuous briefs.

That was just the beginning.

By the time I ended my 50-year career as a trial attorney, judge and president of southern Arizona's largest law firm, I no longer had confidence in the legal fraternity I had participated in and, yes, profited from.

I was the ultimate insider, but as I looked back, I felt I had to write a book about serious issues in the legal profession and the implications for clients and society as a whole. The Fraternity: Lawyers and Judges in Collusion was 10 years in the making and has become my call to action
for legal reform.

Disturbing evolution

Our Constitution intended that only elected lawmakers be permitted to create law.

Yet judges create their own law in the judicial system based on their own opinions and rulings. It's called case law, and it is churned out daily through the rulings of judges. When a judge hands down a ruling and that ruling survives appeal with the next tier of judges, it then becomes case law, or legal precedent. This now happens so consistently that we've become more subject to the case rulings of judges rather than to laws made by the lawmaking bodies outlined in our Constitution.

This case-law system is a constitutional nightmare because it continuously modifies Constitutional intent. For lawyers, however, it creates endless business opportunities. That's because case law is technically complicated and requires a lawyer's expertise to guide and move you through the system. The judicial system may begin with enacted laws, but the variations that result from a judge's application of case law all too often change the ultimate meaning.

Lawyer domination

When a lawyer puts on a robe and takes the bench, he or she is called a
judge. But in reality, when judges look down from the bench they are
lawyers looking upon fellow members of their fraternity. In any other
area of the free-enterprise system, this would be seen as a conflict of
interest.

When a lawyer takes an oath as a judge, it merely enhances the ruling
class of lawyers and judges. First of all, in Maricopa and Pima
counties, judges are not elected but nominated by committees of lawyers,
along with concerned citizens.How can they be expected not to be
beholden to those who elevated them to the bench?

When they leave the bench, many return to large and successful law firms
that leverage their names and relationships.


Business of law

The concept of "time" has been converted into enormous revenue for
lawyers. The profession has adopted elaborate systems where clients are
billed for a lawyer's time in six-minute increments. The paralegal
profession is another brainchild of the fraternity, created as an
additional tracking and revenue center. High-powered firms have
departmentalized their services into separate profit centers for probate
and trusts, trial, commercial, and so forth.

The once-honorable profession of law now fully functions as a
bottom-line business, driven by greed and the pursuit of power and
wealth, even shaping the laws of the United States outside the elected
Congress and state legislatures.


Bureaucratic design

Today the skill and gamesmanship of lawyers, not the truth, often
determine the outcome of a case. And we lawyers love it. All the tools
are there to obscure and confound. The system's process of discovery and
the exclusionary rule often work to keep vital information off-limits to
jurors and make cases so convoluted and complex that only lawyers and
judges understand them.

The net effect has been to increase our need for lawyers, create more work for them, clog the courts and ensure that most cases never go to trial and are, instead, plea-bargained and compromised. All the while the clock is ticking, and the monster is being fed.

The sullying of American law has resulted in a fountain of money for law professionals while the common people, who are increasingly affected by lawyer-driven changes and an expensive, self-serving bureaucracy, are left confused and ill-served.

Today, it is estimated that 70 percent of low- to middle-income citizens can no longer afford the cost of justice in America. What would our Founding Fathers think?

This devolution of lawmaking by the judiciary has been subtle, taking place incrementally over decades. But today, it's engrained in our legal system, and few even question it. But the result is clear. Individuals can no longer participate in the legal system.

It has become too complex and too expensive, all the while feeding our dependency on lawyers.

By complicating the law, lawyers have achieved the ultimate job security. Gone are the days when American courts functioned to serve justice simply and swiftly.

It is estimated that 95 million legal actions now pass through the courts annually, and the time and expense for a plaintiff or defendant in our legal system can be absolutely overwhelming.

Surely it's time to question what has happened to our justice system and to wonder if it is possible to return to a system that truly does protect us from wrongs.

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We Need New Leadership! Our Democratic System Is Failing

This is a YouTube video that you need to watch to find out what is our main problem in righting the wrongs that exist in our society today.

“This source of corruption, alas, is inherent in the democratic system itself, and it can only be controlled, if at all, by finding ways to encourage legislators to subordinate ambition to principle.” –James L. Buckley

All along we have wondered why the yoke of servitude and peonage could have been placed on innocent American under the color of law. These are laws that are facially unconstitutional and violate the most basic of citizens rights….The Right To Privacy in decisions relating to marriage.

Innocent citizens are criminalized by the imposition of laws that are lacking adequate guidelines and are so vague and unclear, judges are unable to rule with any degree of consistency. They are
criminalized by imposing laws under which no two judges are able to arrive at the same conclusion given the same facts of a case. They are criminalized by imposing laws by which the participants are subject to the whims and prejudices of the individual judges.

When the laws are unclear and uncertain, as are those of Florida Statute 61.08, which govern the alimony statutes, the only way the judge can rule on the case is by, in effect, clearly creating a new law (ruling) governing in each case and that follows no rigid guideline as required to do equity between the parties.

Creating laws by the judiciary is a violation of the Separation of Powers between the Judiciary (who administer the laws) and the Legislature (who make the laws) as mandated by the Constitution

Did this happen by accident or was it well planned out by a group of self-serving people who swore am oath of office to uphold the constitutional rights of those whom they purport to represent?

The alimony burdens that have been imposed upon unsuspecting spouses in direct violation of their constitutional right can be traced back to our legislatures and the legislators who pass these
self-serving laws that primarily benefit the state, the legal industry and all the parasites that feed off it to the tune of multi-billions of dollars each year..

Ask yourself: “for what other reason would laws support the lifetime strangle-hold on spouses by retaining jurisdiction over them in the final judgment of dissolution?”

In two separate Florida judicial jurisdictions, the circuit courts, the district court of appeals, and the Florida Supreme Court abrogated their duty to provide a citizen with a declaratory judgment on whether or not the Florida alimony statute 61.08 violated the state constitution.

The cowardly act of the courts refusal to rule on a constitutional issue was simply because the far reaching effect of such a ruling would not only destroy the legal industry’s multi-billion dollar

cash cow but would invalidate, ab initio (back to the beginning), the statute that was unconstitutional as of it’s date of enactment. Follow the filed cases by clicking here.

In reading the following article, it was felt that it accurately reflects where the blame should be placed for such inequitable laws. Even though the article references the U.S. Congress, we can equally apply it to a state congress.

Charley Reese, a writer with the Orlando Sentinel Newspaper has offered a rather fresh look at the national leaders who are responsible for most of the mess we find our nation in. Might mention that Charley is a bonafide "southerner".

THE 545 PEOPLE RESPONSIBLE FOR AMERICA'S WOES!!

By Charley Reese

Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.

Have you ever wondered why, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, we have deficits? Have you ever wondered why, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, we have inflation and high taxes?

You and I don't propose a federal budget. The president does. You and I don't have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does. You and I don't write the tax code. Congress does.You and I don't set fiscal policy. Congress does. You and I don't control monetary policy. The Federal Reserve Bank does.

One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president and nine Supreme Court Justices - 545 human beings out of the 300 million - are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.

I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered but private central bank.

I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason. They have no legal authority. They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman or a president to do one cotton- picking thing. I don't care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash. The politician has the power to accept or reject it.

No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator's responsibility to determine how he votes.

A CONFIDENCE CONSPIRACY

Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party.

What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of a SPEAKER, who stood up and criticized G.W. BUSH for creating deficits.

The president can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it. The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes.

Who is the speaker of the House? She is the leader of the majority party. She and fellow Democrats, not the president, can approve any budget they want. If the president vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto.

REPLACE THE SCOUNDRELS

It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million cannot replace 545 people who stand convicted -- by present facts - of incompetence and irresponsibility.

I can't think of a single domestic problem, from an unfair tax code to defense overruns, that is not traceable directly to those 545 people.

When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.

If the tax code is unfair, it's because they want it unfair. If the budget is in the red, it's because they want it in the red. If the Marines are in IRAQ, it's because they want them in IRAQ.

There are no insoluble government problems. Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom theygive the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power.

Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exist disembodied mystical forces like "the economy," "inflation" or "politics" that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.

Those 545 people, and they alone, are responsible. They, and they alone, have the power. They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses - provided the voters have the gumption to manage their own employees. We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess.