During a panel discussion at the Asian American Bar Association of New York, Vivia Chen from ALM’s  The Careerist asserted that the blawgosphere has helped to educate and inform non-lawyers on the law, thus making them more knowledgeable.  I strongly disagreed.

My take is that non-lawyers latch on to whatever writings support their preconceived notions, using the fact that a lawyer agrees with them as proof of their validity of their position.  No matter how batshit crazy it may be. Confirmation bias at its finest, if you will.  Do you not think lawyers get fitted for tin foil hats too?

During some recent romps through the blogosphere, I’ve read a variety of posts about law, decisions and governmental actions written by IANAL bloggers with significant followings that were shockingly misguided.  Whether overly simplistic or just plain wrong, there was a theme to be found: They disclaimed adequate knowledge to proffer their opinion, but did so anyway. 

And from comments that followed, they were applauded by a great many other IANAL commenters whose anger and ignorance was bolstered by this public validation of their beliefs.  Then came the kicker, a link thrown in here and there to some lawyer somewhere who supported their position.  Professional confirmation. 

If I was a law professor, I would explain this phenomenon this way:

Earlier this month, I blogged about assertionism — my label for usage claims that sound like prescriptivism, but are actually bare assertions: They don’t rely on any claims about what the (supposed) Linguistic Authorities say, on any detailed logical arguments, or on claims about allegedly superior clarity or precision; they just consist of a person’s bare assertions. And when one asks for evidence supporting the claim, all one gets is more bare assertions. Prescriptivists ought to dislike assertionism as much as descriptivists do, partly because assertionism often comes across as unintentional parody of prescriptivism.

I hope this paragraph makes your head hurt as much as it did mine.  Yes, I’m that cruel.  But I’m not that smart, and so I explain things using smaller words.  We, lawyers, do not have the authority to make naked claims, unsupported by law or reason, that make non-lawyers stupider for having read them.

Lawyers have an ethical duty to educate the public in the law.  We have a concomitant duty not to make deceive them.  While we don’t forfeit our right to free speech upon taking the oath, at least not exactly, we undertake certain responsibilities that constrain our ability to assert whatever we please when it comes to something where our specialized knowledge gives us the appearance of credibility.  We can’t just spew.

You want to spew?  You have fee-eee-eeelings?  You are angry and frustrated because the law sucks, truth to power, David versus Goliath?  How nice for you, the freedom to assert whatever pops into your head, cloaking yourself in your legal education, your expertise, so that the mere assertion by you carries the weight of a professional opinion that others can embrace and hold to their breast.

This isn’t necessarily a criticism of lawyers trying to use the internet to market themselves.  There is no inherent conflict with demonstrating expertise in a particular niche of law for the purpose of showing potential clients that you possess the knowledge and abilities they want from a lawyer.  But if you find it hard to crank out a substantive blog post, or become taken with your ability to reveal your deepest, darkest peeve despite the utter absence of any rational basis, and fill in the blank blog space with it, then there is a problem.

The Hippocratic oath is rumored to begin, Primum non nocere, First, do no harm.  Blawgers take no oath.  The barriers to a lawyer showing up on the internet and offering opinions to as many people as will read them is a dollar and a dream. 

Despite the fact that every lawyer is brilliant (it’s those other lawyers who are blithering idiots), some of the brethren have blogs that offer opinions that are wholly unsupportable, that reflect the pathetic reality that they are wearing tin foil hats.  They confirm the wildest and most bizarre beliefs of non-lawyers. They validate confusion and misunderstanding.

All this leads up to an aspiration that we should all make the core of our efforts in public expression as lawyers. 

Leave no one stupider for having read what we write.

Before anyone points out the obvious, not everything I’ve written comports with this idea, and I apologize for my trespasses.  I promise to do better.  And if you are writing as a lawyer, offering naked assertions that serve to bolster non-lawyers beliefs in the bizarre and ridiculous, do better as well. 

Society is suffering from a lot of maladies lately, and it’s not entirely clear that we have the capacity to cure every disease.  Let’s not inflame the boil of stupidity.  We may not be able to fix anything, but we can certainly not make things worse.