----- Original Message ----- From: "Carrol Cox" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > I don't think this will wash. Inside a capitalist society it is almost > tautological that attorneys have a duty to serve their client's > interests, and one cannot qualify tht without seriously endangering the > left, which desperately needs those few lawyers (and fewer when most > needed) who will seriously defend leftist defendants. ============= I see no harm being done by pointing out a trivial truth which is part of the larger issue of whether the law can even be a vehicle for advance left interests. If not, while it might be nice that some lawyers do ably defend leftists, the problem of the legitimacy of the law's connection to capitalism is at stake and whether leftists should call for the severe attenuation if not elimination of law as a mode of social regulation. Given that the latter most likely cannot happen without signficant bloodshed as well as lots of lawyers making lots of money from the rise in social antagonisms along the way; just what should a left critique of the law encompass if leftists are to still be interested in helping create a post-capitalist economic system? Is the law the enemy or potential ally? If the law ultimately protects capitalism and will use any and every means at it's disposal to prevent the undermining of it's claim to legitimacy then what's the point? > > Moreover, given the nature of the whole criminal-justice system in this > nation, and the idiocy of much of the penal code, it is essential for > the working class as a whole (whether workers know it or not) to have > lawyers who will do their best to get off guilty clients. ============= Yeah but that's a merely "defensive" position. If the law sees the very attempt of the citizenry to undo the enormous complexity of it's scale and scope of regulating behavior as something that calls for an even more imperial mode of legalism then how do we get out of the iron cage? > > Also protests against lawyers serving bad guys (corporations, etc.) are > incoherent. Within a capitalist system the bad guys are going to have > their interests served. It is sort of silly complaining about the > particular machinery that serves those interests, particularly since > that same machinery sometimes serves us. > > Carrol > ==================== No they aren't. And no one is calling for complaining about the machinery; rather how to get it to either change gears or shut down. Simply think of the enlargement of the law over the course of the 20th century. Shall we have the same rate of growth of the law as a mode of social regulation over the course of the 21st? Ian
