The hedgehog and the fox

We need a comprehensive list of guilty beaks ... RICO legislation well overdue ... Dworkin's theory of law fails to grasp the importance of money ... Deep within the system we find the Wisners ... Evan Whitton at large

Cat out of bottle

Tulkinghorn notes (Justinian February 9) that law prof (U of Tennessee) Ben Barton has let the cat out of Pandora's box, and that the genie cannot be put back in the bottle.

Or words to that effect.

Barton's book, The Lawyer-Judge Bias in the American Legal System (Cambridge UP, 2011), expands on his 2007 hypothesis that in many cases common law judges favour lawyers' money interests. 

Still needed: a comprehensive list of the guilty beaks.

Here's a start: the 32 Chancellors, including Farrer Herschell, who colluded with Chancery lawyers between 1798 and 1915 to "devour" a $1.5 billion estate.

Lawyers ♥ Herschell

Herschell: large scale perverterIn 1894, Lord Herschell invented a rule that has perverted justice on a vast scale, but inspired millions of organised criminals to press their ill-gotten gains on lawyers.  

Herschell's rule against "similar facts", i.e. a criminal pattern, obliges prosecutors to deceive the jury: serial offenders, including rapists, are presented as first offenders.

Forty years ago, the US Congress enacted an exception to the rule, legislation called RICO (Racketeer-influenced and Corrupt Organisations).

RICO has put away any number of previously untouchable organised criminals, including 20 corrupt judges and their 50 bagmen, mainly lawyers, in Chicago alone.

Organised crims ♥ Law Enforcement Committee  

Not surprisingly, Australian law enforcement experts have sought RICO-type legislation for 26 years.

Surprisingly, they have been thwarted at every turn by professedly lorn order politicians.

In the interests of a crumb of justice for Herschell's victims, your correspondent recently made a submission to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Law Enforcement.

The submission gave chapter and verse on the origins and consequences of both Herschell's rule and RICO.

Timothy Watling, secretary to the committee, replied:

"This committee is responsible for oversight of the Australian Federal Police and Australian Crime Commission, and has no law reform role. Furthermore, the committee is not undertaking , and is unlikely to undertake in the future, any inquiry to which your correspondence would be relevant. For those reasons, I am regretfully unable to accept your submission."

Ronnie Dworkin QC - no hedgehog he

The fox knows many things; the hedgehog one great thing.

- Archilochus (c. 680 BC – c. 645 BC), mercenary and first lyric poet

Dworkin: Justice for HedgehogsAncient Egyptian law was hedgehoggish; it knew that justice requires truth and morality.   

Some 4,700 years later, Ronald Dworkin, jurisprudence prof at Oxford, developed a theory of law as integrity.

Well done that man!

In 2007, the University of Bergen (Norway) awarded him the Holberg Prize worth US$450,000. The citation commended him for developing "an original [!] and highly influential [!] legal theory grounding law in morality".

Ronnie, now 79 and prof of law and philosophy at New York University, has written Justice for Hedgehogs (Belknap/Harvard UP, 2011), replete with mind-numbing high order abstractions. 

Belknap drumbeaters state that Dworko, "argues that value in all its forms is one big thing: that what truth is, life means, morality requires, and justice demands".

Alas, Ronnie does not seem to have grasped that the law's one great thing is to make money for lawyers; injustice is systemic in an anti-truth and immoral system.

Perhaps the book by his distinguished colleague, Prof Barton, will give him a clue.   

A constitutional oligarchy of rich business men

As noted here (Oct 4, 2005), a lawyer, Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804), believed that an oligarchy of rich business men would make the US powerful.

Burr: aimed lower than HamiltonHamilton lobbied successfully for Section 2 of Article 2 of the Constitution, which made the US a constitutional oligarchy. An oligarchy tends, almost by definition, to be bent.

In a duel with Aaron Burr, Hamilton, lawyer and gentleman, aimed high. Burr, lawyer, did not, but Hamilton lives on in a ruling (Fletcher v Peck, 1810) by his disciple, Chief Justice John Marshall: corruption is just part of the rich tapestry of bidness.

The slightly deranged Tea Party people are enchanted with the Constitution, but when they realise they are being got at by rich businessmen, they will probably dump copies in Boston Harbor, and even torch the offices of the lawyer/lobbyists who infest Washington.

Rich business men don't go to prison

Bernie Madoff, who is said to have stiffed investors of $50 billion, told The New York Times on February 15 that "bankers and hedge funds" were "complicit" in his crimes.

His disclosure was apparently in response Frank Rich's observation (NYT, Feb. 12) that Madoff (who admitted his guilt) is "the only headline figure of the crash who did go to prison".

The scum also rises

Alexander Hamilton's vision reached fruition after the 1939-45 war. Unfortunately, US  power was used to create a rogue state.

The roguishness was manifested in, among others, Frank Wisner. From 1948, he was head of the CIA's black bag unit, which included assassins.  

Wisner recruited black baggers from his New York law firm, Carter Ledyard, and ran Operation Mockingbird to suborn reptiles at home and abroad.

Democracy is messy; oligarchs are more comfortable with dictators. Wisner and his deputy, Richard Helms, who later arranged the assassination of President Kennedy, put an end to democracy in Guatemala in 1953 and in Iran in 1954.

Wisner was officially declared mad in 1956, and topped himself with a son's shotgun in 1965, but the mocking birds never sleep.

Some US and foreign reporters invariably parrot the oligarchs' line, e.g. that Australia's Julian Assange should be taken out and shot for revealing their perfidy. 

The scum also falls  

The US has become increasingly irrelevant since the country was bankrupted by George W. Bush's Iraqi adventure plus the financial crisis created by rich business men.

The irrelevance was confirmed by the US role, or lack of it, when reptile-inspired Egyptians demanded that Hosni Mubarak's dictatorship be replaced by democracy. 

Frank Wisner Jr: man with a messageFor 30 years, the US position, dictated by the Israel Lobby, was that Mubarak's dictatorship was "crucial" to "stability".

Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton didn't know which way to crawfish. They sent the charmingly ugly Frank Wisner Jnr, 72, to give Mubarak a message. But what message?

Wisner had been a diplomat with a stint in Egypt (1986-91) and is now a member of a Washington firm of lawyer/lobbyists, Patton Boggs, who were on Mubarak's payroll.    

Wisner publicly stated that "stability" made it "crucial" for Mubarak to stay on.  

In the end, the Army tapped Mubarak on the shoulder, but Patton Boggs (and presumably) Wisner are still nicely placed: they advise the Egyptian Army.

What really matters

In The Lost Diaries (Fourth Estate HarperCollins, 2010), Tony Blair, lawyer and war criminal, is one of satirist Craig Brown's targets.   

Blair, planning another campaign, diarises: "You know what matters? I'll tell you what really matters. What really matters; that's what really matters.

"I said No to complacency in 1997. I said No to complacency in 2001. And so I think to myself, it seemed to work then - so why not say it again now?"

Brown says Germaine Greer, 72, is the mistress of self-parody; she "can never see the wrong end of a stick without trying to grab it with both hands".