Back in the early days of SJ, during the throes of #Reinvent Law and A2J, access to justice, two beliefs meshed into the fantastical belief that because lawyers were too expensive and inaccessible to much of the public, putting statutes and caselaw online would enable non-lawyers, regular people if you will, to gain sufficient legal information to knowledgeably conduct their affairs and engage with the law. This belief gave rise to such sites as the Cornell Legal Information Institute as well as a handful of free websites publishing court decisions.

While I was not against the concept of putting law online, I argued that this notion was not merely wrong, but dangerously nuts. The nice folks at Cornell LII were not pleased with me. More than a decade later, there is little doubt that it was just a sweet fantasy, and that people are not only ignorant of law, but proud and certain of their ignorance. I pointed this out with regard to people’s beliefs as to the legality and propriety of the United States murdering people on the high seas and ICE’s flagrant violation of constitutional rights in its zeal to get every “illegal” at all costs.  The reactions were, well, sadly unsurprising.

An NYU Law adjunct, Max Raskin, has revisited the fantasy, having learned nothing from experience.

The bar exam, the Law School Admission Test and law school itself are the price you pay for joining a government-protected legal guild — no different from taxi medallions or liquor licenses. It is essentially illegal to represent someone else in court without passing this test, which is an exception to the general rule that people should be allowed to hire whomever they want without the government’s permission.

Is a law license, gained after passage of the bar exam and, in the usual course, graduation from law school, really the same as a taxi medallion or liquor license (which notably aren’t the same either)?

The best defense of this system is that while it is not necessary to memorize the arcane rule against perpetuities to be a competent lawyer because you can always use Google, the temperament of the person who has the sitzfleisch to study for these exams is the kind of person who makes an effective lawyer.

Did you catch that nugget, “you can always use Google”? He’s not wrong that you can Google pretty much anything, including law, and good lawyers always research the law, read the relevant statute and caselaw to make certain they know what they’re talking about and are on top of whatever issue they’re addressing. But he’s dead wrong that anyone with a Google machine can do it as well, and do it just as well, without the foundation in law and reasoning that a law school graduate should possess.

Nor is the “best defense” that anyone with the “the sitzfleisch to study for these exams” has the “temperament” to be an effective lawyer. It’s not clear what he means by “temperament,” whether he’s referring to the fortitude to work hard, plod through the boring stuff and keep researching, learning, absorbing information until satisfied that he or she knows everything needed to be effective. If so, that matters, but that’s not all that matters.

Not everyone is suited for this gig, whether because they can get on their feet before a jury and make an impassioned plea, know when to leap up and object and when to sit down and keep your mouth shut, how to frame a question off the top of his head that will make a DEA agent cry on the witness stand. How to take a punch to the gut from a judge, a prosecutor or even your own client, and still get back up and do it all over again. With gusto.

Here we are, more than a decade later, with a cohort of extremely vehement and absolutely certain partisans, not merely as legally ignorant as their forebearers, but virulently so, to the tune of applauding rampant constitutional violations and murder, secure in the belief that they have sufficient knowledge of law to know that they’re on the side of truth and justice.

Ironically, many find solace in the online statutes and caselaw because they have no clue what they’re talking about and, from the perspective of a person with “a little knowledge,” it confirms their priors and secures them in the fantasy that they know the law and the law says they can do whatever they want done. It was clear to me a decade ago that online law wouldn’t make a lawyer, but what I didn’t see then was how online law would make a murder apologist.