It might well be natural to want to penalize lawyers on the winning end of the suit - considering how much they receive when they aren't even the victim - but I don't see how that has any bearing on what I was saying. Perhaps you mistyped and meant on the losing side?

If you are sued and you win the suit, why should you be faced with financial ruin as the winner of the suit? If the person suing you claims that you should be required to "make them whole" as a result of some alleged action that caused them injury and the jury determines that their suit lacks sufficient merit, why is it unreasonable for you to expect that the person suing you should have to make YOU whole as a result of their actions that caused injury to you?

Why do my comments sound very personal? They aren't. And I don't feel differently if myself or a family member stands to benefit. Case in point. When I lost my ROTC scholarship and was called involuntarily to active duty a lawyer called me up and said that for about $1200 to $2000 he could get be released from my obligation. While I certainly did NOT want to have to drop out of school a second time and serve enlisted for two years before getting on with my life I was adamant that I did not have the right to be released from a contract that I had willingly signed. The lawyer spent two hours trying to convince me that what I had signed meant nothing, that the point was to make the Air Force's life sufficiently miserable that they would release me from my obligation rather that do what was necessary to enforce the contract and kept telling me that he had over an 80% success rate at getting people released and that I would owe him nothing if he wasn't successful. For the entire two hours I said over and over that it didn't matter what COULD be done legally - it was a matter of what was RIGHT and that I was legally, morally and ethically bound to honor the contract that both I and the Air Force had entered into in good faith. The last thing he said before I gave up and hung up on him was how sad it was that I was so naive about our legal system and how I need to learn how to use it to accomplish my goals. Now, I have never held up that particular individual as an example of the typical lawyer. He was an ambulance chaser pure and simple. Most lawyers try to do not only what is legal but what is right and make a good faith effort to operate at the intersection of those two goals as much as possible. But he IS typical of the subset of lawyers we are talking about here. A huge fraction of class-action lawyers are nothing but ambulance chasers.

But I am an ardent supporter of the concept of "The Rule of Law" - I have been willing to in the past and am willing to in the future to defend that concept both at the risk of my own life and at the risk of having to take someone else's life. But I fervently believe that no system that purports to embody the concept of The Rule of Law can truly do so unless it accepts and demands that those laws apply equally to everyone.

You'll notice that I talked about the tobacco settlement quite a bit yet I am not a smoker and can't stand the smell of cigarette smoke and think that it is a very vile and unhealthy habit to have and am categorically opposed to tobacco subsidies (and nearly all other subsidies - in fact I can't think off the top of my head of any that I do support).

My beef with out legal system is hypocrisy (and I have that beef about many aspects of our society - and other countries' institutions). The oft quoted position that "the system isn't perfect and there are costs to the individuals" never recognizes that this same position applies to EVERY thing. Everything has risks. Everything has costs. Yet the legal system believes that people should simply accept the costs it burdens people with while every other aspect of society should be held accountable and penalized for every cost it results in.

You can't manufacture ANY thing with an absolute zero defect rate yet the person that is injured by a defective hammer is entitled to have their case heard and an award made even if it was the only defective hammer out of millions that were manufactured. A surgeon that misreads one patient's chart out of thousands and performs the surgery to the wrong knee is in big legal trouble and open to a huge civil lawsuit yet the judge that misreads the documents in front of her and lets a person charged with multiple murders who is not even eligible for bail out on bond faces no penalties and cannot be sued by the family of the victim that was murdered by that person while out on bail (true story from this area a few years ago).

If the legal system wants to be cut slack because no system is perfect, then where does it get the right to penalize others when things don't go perfectly? All I am asking is for the legal system to be held to the same level and type of accountability that it feels that everyone else should be held to. It can either increase the standards and liabilities for its members or acknowledge that NOTHING is perfect and that life isn't fair and that accidents and mistakes happen and that people have to live with the unfortunate costs associated with them. What I really would like to see is a middle-of-the-road compromise whereby the legal system basically says that there is a certain level of misconduct and negligence that has to be surpassed before any civil or criminal liability is encountered AND to apply that SAME level to its own practitioners.

I do not feel it is right, proper, or healthy for any segment of society, and most especially one so closely tied to one of the fundamental branches of government, to be in a position to insulate itself from the very rules that it has the power to impose on everyone else. That is a recipe for abuse (and we have seen it happen throughout history all over the world and even in this country on a limited scale because of our rather comprehensive - but not perfect - system of checks and balances).

As for the jury system (which I DO believe is the best type of system and which I fully support) it is also so very interesting to watch it manipulated relentlessly by the lawyers. I agree that it is very sad that so many people actively seek to avoid jury duty, but it is quite interesting to watch jury selection proceedings. As a rule, I can pretty quickly determine if a given person is going to be eliminated from the jury pool based on whether their answers to the questions asked indicate that they are someone that will think and analyzes the evidence before them and are apt to make up their mind based on the evidence and not on the emotional appeals of the two lawyers. The lawyers, more often than not, seem far more interested in turning the trial into a sales pitch aimed at convincing the jury that they WANT to see things a certain way as opposed to deciding for themselves what the facts in evidence mean.

Another thing that I find interesting - though I don't know what to really make of it. I had a social studies teacher in high school that first pointed out to me how quickly someone with an advanced degree was usually eliminated from the jury pool. That's distressfull enough and I have seen plenty of indications that it is the rule rather than the exception. But this same teacher said something that I was completely unwilling to accept back then. She said that people with technical professions or advanced degrees aren't even called for jury duty nearly as frequently as the general population. I couldn't see how that was even possible since calls to jury duty are supposed to be random based on various rolls - voter registrations, driver's license lists, etc - so I discounted that claim. Yet as time goes by, I am beginning to think she was right. I work for a company that has ten engineers and one non-technical, non-degreed employee. All of us vote in every election, all of us drive, all of us are homeowners. Yet none of the engineers have been called for jury duty once in the seven years I have been there while the other person has been called three times. It has been a similar situation other places I have been and others that I have asked have usually seen a similar pattern. I don't know what to make of it and, quite frankly, the implications of it - if true - are rather frightening.