Lawyers Dominate Congress
The Congress of the United States comprises the House of Representatives and the Senate. There are 435 Representatives and 100 Senators for a total of 535 members of Congress. According to this C-Span document, the 109th Congress included 228 members who hold law degrees and 217 members whose former occupation was in law. With the exception of former state legislators, lawyers were the dominant professional group.
I looked for, but did not find, data for the 110th Congress. But I would be surprised if the situation has changed much.
Posted by William F. Vallicella on
Thursday January 4, 2007 at 6:53pm
Well, given that the task of Congress is to write the nation's laws, I suppose we shouldn't be surprised.
Point taken, but I would like to see more engineers, scientists, and ordinary folk in Congress. Lawyers are excessively verbal and don't produce anything. Many of them are the modern-day equivalents of the Sophists of the ancient world. They'll argue anything for a buck. That's why, nowadays, we don't say, with Luther, "reason is a whore," but "reason is a lawyer." Every craft makes crooked, and legal training especially. And given the need of de-legislators, this is not a task one can expect lawyers to perform.
We are choking on a surfeit of Ls: too many laws, lawyers, and liberals.
Or am I exaggerating?
But yes, it seems that a lot of the law's complexity is little more than job security for lawyers - put in by lawyers, to be parsed by lawyers - though I imagine a lawyer could prepare a closely argued rebuttal to such a folksy observation.
If there were some way to hold legislators' feet to the fire in terms of making the law as clear and simple as possible, progress might be made, I suppose, but what would such a law look like? We'd need a good team of lawyers to draw it up.
Law and philosophy would seem to have much in common, but the difference is that philosophers have other philosophers to keep them honest, whereas I am not so sure that's what lawyers do, exactly.
A late happy new year to you.
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