Rules, Misconceptions and Conspiracy Theories

Reading Gideon’s  Monday Morning Jumpstart (which I love because Gid picks up a bunch of interesting stuff that I often miss on my own) this morning, it occurred to me that there are some great posts around that suffer from a basic misunderstanding in the blawgosphere. 

Many, myself included, like to talk about the blawgosphere as a conversation.  To some extent, it is, but it’s an imperfect one.  It’s limited by the inherent restrictions of written expression, omitting tone and nuance.  The lack of give and take results in people writing lengthy tomes, raising numerous points of varying degrees of relevance, and making it too unwieldy to cover everything.

But the most significant limitation is the inability to know who we are talking to.  We each carry baggage, our education, our experience, our location, our prejudice.  This is one of the reasons I harp on the problem with anonymity in the blawgosphere.  Our ability to understand what others are saying depends to some extent on knowing who we’re having a conversation with. 

We project our own understanding onto others when we have nothing else to go by.  It makes for disagreements when none really exist.  It produces confusion rather than illumination.  We end up fighting with shadows to no avail.

One such post from Gideon this morning comes from the Rocky Mountain News, entitled “Debunking the top 10 myths of jury trials.”  I thought this was a very good piece.  Perfect?  No.  Comprehensive?  Not quite.  Deep?  Hardly.  But very good for its audience. 

Obviously, this was not directed at trial lawyers.  Why would trial lawyers need some consultant to debunk trial myths?  This article was clearly intended to provide some basic information to the general public to dispel some similarly basic yet pervasive misunderstandings about criminal trials.  And for that purpose, it was great.

So then comes the lawyers and the lawyer-haters, the cops and the cop-haters, to argue about it.  The argument veered off into jury nullification (apparently a very hot issue lately, with a hat tip to the Texas Tornado).  Interesting though the discussion might be, it was tangential (at best) to the article and hijacked it from its obvious purpose.  Hey, that’s the blawgosphere, right?

I read another  post by Grits about Rothgerry and a book by Richard Leo, “Police Interrogations and American Justice.”  Scott’s view of Leo’s message took it in a different direction than I had thought about before, with an emphasis on when a defendant should be entitled to counsel rather than how police interrogation tactics tend to produce false confessions.  It was an interesting approach.

I became aware of Leo’s book when Anne Reed  wrote about it a while back.  It was not particularly impressive, as far as I was concerned, stating an obvious problem at length and offering no real solution.  In this field, we have long been aware of the problems with police interrogations.  We really don’t need scholarly validation of the obvious. 

But the Grits post, by taking it in a different direction, presented a different issue, since police interrogate two distinct types of people:  Targets and Witnesses.   At first, I thought that I should point out this distinction, since Grit’s was absolutely correct in his assessment about targets, but it didn’t apply to non-targets, who were interviewed for the sole purpose of gathering evidence against the target.  But what would this have done to Scott’s point in writing the post?  Nothing positive, and the post was worthwhile, if not exactly perfect.  And perhaps it would have misdirected an important point by pushing a tangential point.

The blawgosphere is primarily inhabited by lawyers, but we also have another group that seems to flit in and out according to their personal issues.  No matter what gets posted, there’s no pleasing them.  These are the conspiracy theorists, the ones who believe that all lawyers are evil and bent on total domination.

Two lawyers can barely agree on where to have lunch.  The idea that they could agree on world hegemony is ludicrous.  But there’s no arguing with these folks, who wear aluminum foil around their heads to protect them from the bar association shooting gamma rays at them.  Even though they tend to write silly things, express opinion devoid of fact, and demand their “right” to be vulgar and angry, they still keep coming.  How do we write for these people?  How do we stop them from dragging the conversation into the gutter?

These conspiracy theorists add nothing to the conversation.  Indeed, they are conversation killers to everyone but other conspiracy theorists and themselves.  They do so love to post and post and post about their generic hatred of lawyers.  But that’s the nature of the blawgosphere, where anyone who happens upon a post can chime in, no matter how much or little they know or have to add.  About the best we can do is cut them off, delete the worst or silliest, and even that tends not to slow them down.  They are on a mission.  Possibly from Mars.

The legitimate media looks at the blogosphere as the realm of kooks and misbegotten self-appointed pundits.  They may have a point.  I would like to think we can do better.  I plan to try.  Do me a favor and before somebody jumps in to argue, ask yourself if it adds to the conversation or is just offered to be contrary and ornery.

6 thoughts on “Rules, Misconceptions and Conspiracy Theories

  1. Gritsforbreakfast

    Uh … am I now a “lawyer hater”?

    My father (the incoming president of the Texas Association of Defense Counsel who was recently named a “Super Lawyer” by Texas Monthly) will be so disappointed!

    On the distinction between targets and witnesses, you’re exactly right that I didn’t go into that further because “it would have misdirected an important point by pushing a tangential point.” Leo’s book is a pretty well-done piece of scholarship that stands on its own, and I was just drawing out one small piece of his argument.

  2. SHG

    Don’t get all sensitive on me.  The “lawyer-hater” had nothing to do with your post (or you).  That’s exactly why I said what I said (which is what I said) and didn’t post a comment that might have side-tracked your important point.  As for Leo’s book, eh, but reasonable minds can differ.

  3. Supremacy Claus

    Scott: If you know the names of any lawyers that believe the following, please, let me have the names.

    1) litigation privileges should end.

    2) minds cannot be read;

    3) future, rare accidents cannot be forecast;

    4) the gut feelings of twelve strangers off the street cannot be used as a lie detector;

    5) the lawyer should not control the three branches of government, with any elected official as a figurehead;

    6) the criminal has the total protection of the criminal lover lawyer, with only 1 in 100 FBI Index felonies resulting in any punishment;

    7) the family and all other sites of authority must be destroyed as competitors of central government run by and for lawyer rent seeking;

    8) so on and on.

    If you cannot name any, you do all share the values of the criminal cult enterprise that is the lawyer profession. I do not distinguish between lawyers on the left or right. Nothing trumps lawyer rent seeking. It was Scalia that loosed millions of vicious predators in his series of anti-guideline cases. Scalia freed more vicious predators than Brennan. The result? The Scalia Bounce in the murder rate.

  4. SHG

    There is no reason to impugn the dignity of animals.  It is not permitted.  “Guana nuts,” on the other hand, is acceptable.

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