There are over two hundred million working adults in America, less than one percent of which are lawyers.
33% of Connecticut state senators are lawyers.
If elected-government officials really represent the general population, you would think that legislators would come from employment-backgrounds that are reflective of the general population. In my opinion, a House, or Senate, filled with people of various occupations, like, maybe a grocery store manager, a barber, a construction worker, an optician, a couple reps from the health care field, an engineer, a pizza shop owner, a mechanic, etc., and other people from everyday working-class jobs, would be a proper representation of the people in my community. One lawyer thrown into the bunch, if there are one hundred representatives, would be a generous representation of the number of lawyers, compared to the number of working adults in America. So if in the Connecticut legislature, where there is a much higher ratio, one out of every three legislators in the state senate are lawyers (12 out of 36), are the people of Connecticut being properly represented?
Also, is it a conflict of interest when people who make their living directly off of the laws passed in the legislature, work in that legislature? I believe so.
Lawyers, working within the legislature, have an incentive to keep the laws complicated, and complex, so that citizens will continue to need more and more "legal representation", as hundreds of new laws get presented every year in the state, and federal, government, making it harder for the average citizen to know the laws, and properly protect, and defend, himself against them, thus needing a lawyer.
If, for instance, a simple change in the drug laws were made, where marijuana would be legalized, or decriminalized, as the majority of Americans believe it should be, it may free many people from the unjust bondage of the state, but it would also lead to many lawyers being out of, or lacking, work. As one professor of law, Ilya Somin, stated, "The War on Drugs is, among other things, a full-employment program for criminal lawyers."
Of course not only criminal lawyers benefit from changes in the law, as Ilya Somin explains,
"In civil law, we have a massive tort law suit system and hundreds of state and federal regulatory agencies that issue mindbogglingly complex regulations that require interpretation by experts if you want to avoid costly liability. And of course we also have an extremely complex tax system that requires many people to hire tax lawyers if they want to keep the IRS off their backs."The potential personal financial return that a lawyer may directly receive from changes to the law, in my opinion, has become too much a conflict of interest to be tolerated.
There are too many laws, and too many lawyers.
