Saturday, October 24, 2015

Article Preview: “Reforming Civil Asset Forfeiture” | New England Law Review

Article Preview: “Reforming Civil Asset Forfeiture” | New England Law Review

SJC Adopts Revised Rules of Professional Conduct

SJC Adopts Revised Rules of Professional Conduct

A father’s mission to reform reporting on abuse of disabled - Bethlehem Spotlight - Local, News, Weather, Sports, Election coverage, for Bethlehem, New Scotland, Guilderland, Glenmont, Ravena, Slingerlands, Capitol, NY

A father’s mission to reform reporting on abuse of disabled - Bethlehem Spotlight - Local, News, Weather, Sports, Election coverage, for Bethlehem, New Scotland, Guilderland, Glenmont, Ravena, Slingerlands, Capitol, NY

Written testimony of Stacy Canan Deputy Assistant Director, Office for Older Americans Consumer Financial Protection Bureau - CUInsight

Written testimony of Stacy Canan Deputy Assistant Director, Office for Older Americans Consumer Financial Protection Bureau - CUInsight

Lawyer indicted for fraud relating to Deepwater Horizon compensation claims - Splash 247

Lawyer indicted for fraud relating to Deepwater Horizon compensation claims - Splash 247

Caseworker gets prison for stealing from elderly couple | 6abc.com

Caseworker gets prison for stealing from elderly couple | 6abc.comThey're charged with conspiracy and money laundering for allegedly
conspiring with a lawyer to steal millions of dollars from elderly
clients.

Monday, October 5, 2015

Gone Without a Case: Suspicious Elder Deaths Rarely Investigated - ProPublica

Gone Without a Case: Suspicious Elder Deaths Rarely Investigated - ProPublica

‘You are also ordered not to post any further information about the [plaintiff]’ - The Washington Post

‘You are also ordered not to post any further information about the [plaintiff]’ - The Washington Post

The Dance of Deception: The US Holocaust Museum Сaught Сovering Up Genocide | New Eastern Outlook

The Dance of Deception: The US Holocaust Museum Сaught Сovering Up Genocide | New Eastern Outlook

Justice: An Impossible Dream?

Justice: An Impossible Dream?



Justice: An Impossible Dream?

The 11-year ordeal of Chester J.
Chalupowski at the hands of unscrupulous lawyers scheming to gain
control over his estate led Dr. Margaret Koch-Nabialczyk to point out
that many books by legal scholars had warned of the crisis that is now
washing over our judicial institutions, entrapping and destroying the
lives of countless citizens who turned to the courts hoping to find
protection and relief from injury.

 

 
The Bigger Picture

MARGARET KOCH-NABIALCZYK, MD PhD
For the first five
years of his legal ordeal, Chester considered himself a
lonely, unfortunate victim of a mean, unethical lawyer, supported and
enabled by a web of his unscrupulous "brothers" and "sisters" utilizing to
their own benefit the numerous tools of the ruthless machine of the legal
system. However, in the summer of 1998, by some kind of divine serendipity,
Chester stumbled upon a book bearing the intriguing title, Jurismania: the
Madness of American Law
, written by Paul F. Campos, a Professor of Law at
the University of Colorado. Chester, by no means a bookworm, devoured
Campos' difficult treatise while growing increasingly amazed, in fact
mesmerized, by its relevance to his own experience. After the first five
years of his anguish, Chester started seeing the legal torment imposed on
him and his family against a backdrop of an enlightening, though menacing,
bigger picture.

Chester, an all-American idealist never anything but proud of his country,
was shaking his head in disbelief. Thinking, "Jurismania, no matter how
depressing, is only one book," Chester set out to search for 'the other side
of the story' assuming that there was one. In an effort to find 'some good
news' (one of his favorite clichés), he went on line, checked the catalogues
of all local libraries, spent long hours sipping coffee, snuggled into a
small cozy couch at the North Shore Mall Borders Books. Shortly he had
assembled a two-foot-high stack of books written by legal scholars,
practicing lawyers, lawyers-turned-journalists, and other open-minded
non-fiction writers. Just looking at the disconcerting titles, Chester had
an uneasy feeling that there was no good news there. Nevertheless, he put
the books in chronological order according to the year of publishing and
began his search for answers.

It seemed that the troubling titles started popping up on bookshelves across
the country by the early 1970s. In 1971 Random House published Law against
the People: Essays to Demystify Law, Order, and the Courts
, by Robert
Lefcourt
. In 1976, a young Ralph Nader and his co-author, Harvard Law School
graduate, Mark Green, edited a collection of alarming essays, Verdicts on
Lawyers
(T. W. Crowell). In 1977 Anne Strick, a prolific fiction and
non-fiction writer, published her now apparently forgotten, yet quite
visionary for its time, Injustice for All: How Our Adversary System of Law
Victimizes Us and Subverts True Justice
(G. P. Putnam's Sons). In 1978, J.
K. Lieberman
tried to alarm us about lawyers' "unethical ethics" in his book
entitled Crisis at the Bar: Lawyers' Unethical Ethics and What to Do about
It
(Norton). In 1980, Philip Stern, a Harvard graduate and special
investigative reporter for The Washington Post, who at age 49 enrolled as a
freshman at Georgetown University Law School, made a daring attempt to put
lawyers on trial in his book actually entitled Lawyers on Trial (Times
Books).

In 1989, Gerry L. Spence, once a famous, self-proclaimed 'country lawyer,'
took on the whole legal system in an effort to "excite and illuminate the
millions of Americans who felt frustrated and betrayed by their justice
system," in With Justice for None: Destroying an American Myth (Times
Books). In 1991, Walter K. Olson, called by Amazon.com, "the legal world's
foremost whistleblower," warned us that the lawsuit industry (according to
Olson, "a civil war in very, very slow motion") was seriously crippling
America, in his book The Litigation Explosion: What Happened when America
Unleashed the Lawsuit
(Dutton).

By the mid-1990s the frequency of disturbing titles showing up on the
market visibly gains momentum as more and more authors eagerly
express their dreadful concerns. In 1993, a noted legal scholar and
educator, Anthony T. Kronman, the current Dean of Yale Law School, states in
his book, The Lost Lawyer: Failing Ideals of the Legal Profession (Harvard
University Press) that the crisis in the American legal profession,
"threatens the collective soul of American lawyers. […] This is a
catastrophe for lawyers. Beyond that, it is a disaster for the country as
well." On the very first page of his book, Kronman states: "Every year
produces a fresh crop of scoundrels and renewed doubts about the ability of
the profession to police itself, along with familiar complaints about the
undue power of lawyers (which any democratic society is bound to regard with
suspicion)." This diagnosis of "legal pathology" is vehemently confirmed by
Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard University Professor of Law, who expressed her
concerns in her book entitled A Nation under Lawyers: How the Crisis in the
Legal Profession is Transforming American Society
(Harvard University
Press). In the Introduction to her book, published in 1994, Glendon states:
"It is precisely because of the unique role of law and lawyers in American
life that a significant advance of arrogance, unruliness, greed, and
cynicism in the legal profession is of more concern than similar
developments in, say, banking or dentistry. […] A breakdown in
self-discipline among lawyers, then, cannot be without consequences for the
wider society."

A similar concern for the degradation of the legal
profession is expressed by Sol M. Linowitz, a Washington, D.C. attorney,
former general counsel and chairman of the board of Xerox, in his 1994 book
The Betrayed Profession: Lawyering at the End of the Twentieth Century
(Scribner). Also in 1994, Philip K. Howard, a lawyer practicing in New York
City, published his book, The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating
America
(Random House). Howard's "distressing, disturbing, devastatingly
detailed indictment" (Amazon.com) of the American legal system called by
reviewers "a blood-boiler" and "a lethal cannonball of a book," stayed on
the Publishers Weekly bestseller list for 25 weeks. In 1996, Ralph Nader
(likely disappointed that his collection of alarming essays, Verdicts on
Lawyers
, published 20 years earlier, did not make much difference) teamed up
with a Californian lawyer-writer, Wesley J. Smith, to write No Contest:
Corporate Lawyers and the Perversion of Justice in America
(Random House).
On the front flap, the editor of the book expresses alarming concerns:
"There is a widespread belief among Americans that something is deeply wrong
with our legal system [dominated by] rapacious thieves with LLDs. But how
has a profession whose ideals are integrity and equality of all sunk so low?
Can this slide be reversed?" One of the book's reviewers, Gloria Steinem,
states: "No Contest makes Watergate and the O.J. Simpson trial look
inconsequential. […] Ralph Nader and Wesley Smith have given us the good
research and deep outrage we need to create social change."

In 1998, the outrage and call for change inspired not only Professor Paul
Campos, but also Max Boot, a young investigative reporter for the Wall
Street Journal and recipient of the Gerald Love Award for Distinguished
Business and Financial Journalism. Boot coined the term "juristocracy" in
his highly acclaimed treatise entitled Out of Order: Arrogance, Corruption,
and Incompetence on the Bench
(Basic Books). Robert H. Bork, a former
federal appeals court judge and the best-selling author of Slouching towards
Gomorrah and The Tempting of America
, states in the Foreword to Max Boot's
book: "Men and women given unaccountable power will often use it to further
their own ends, not ends of the polity which they exist to serve. […] Our
courts are behaving badly and the public, to the degree it can be brought to
understand that, will exact force for reform, a reform that must be
structural as well as intellectual and moral."

After navigating his way through his two-foot-high stack of books, Chester
Chalupowski, deeply disillusioned, found an answer to his question - Paul
Campos was not alone in his doomed vision, there was no 'good news,' and
there was no other, brighter, side to the story told in Jurismania.

Recently, this sad conclusion has been confirmed by more authors courageous
enough to tread on this treacherous ground. In the summer of 1999, Chester,
now an expert on the topic, noticed that Ballantine Books announced The
Moral Compass of the American Lawyer: Truth, Justice, Power and Greed
,
written by Richard Zitrin and Carol M. Langford (both professors of law at
the University of San Francisco, as well as practicing lawyers). The moment
the brand new copy arrived at the Beverly Public Library, Chester was the
first to check it out. While the librarian was still scanning the barcode,
Chester was already reading the publisher's comments placed on the front
flap: "These are perilous times for Americans who need access to the legal
system. Too many lawyers blatantly abuse power and trust, and engage in
reckless ethical misconduct, grossly unjust billing practices, and
dishonesty disguised as client protection."

The contents of the book thoroughly confirms the statement on the cover.

Even more alarming is one of the most recent efforts to bring the crisis in
the American legal system to the public's attention made by Catherine Crier,
a former Dallas lawyer and judge, turned Emmy Award winning TV host and one
of the most respected legal journalists in the nation. In 2002, Crier
published her book, The Case against Lawyers: How the Lawyers, Politicians,
and Bureaucrats Have Turned the Law into an Instrument of Tyranny - and What
We as Citizens Have to Do About It
(Broadway Books). According to the
publisher, Crier "describes an American legal system dangerously out of
control - and finds the lawyers guilty as charged. […] She now confronts a
profoundly unfair legal system that produces results and profits for the few
- and paralysis, frustration, and injustice for the many. […]" The Broadway
Books Editor assures us: "The Case Against Lawyers will make readers hopping
mad. And it will make them realize that the only response can be to demand
change. Now."

While it may be difficult to ascertain whether Crier's book, or any other of
the aforementioned books for that matter, made the readers "hopping mad,"
one thing is painfully apparent - all these books (and many more from the
'Chester's list,' which were not mentioned here) did not make any difference
as far as the condition of the American legal system is concerned. "The
paralysis, frustration, and injustice for the many," complained about for
the last 30 years is getting more and more rampant, and it seems to be here
to stay. All these painstakingly researched and masterfully written books
(some of them as engrossing as good fiction) have not brought about any
change, and apart from documenting the crisis, did not have any significant
impact. Each of them ends with some suggestions for a reform of the legal
system. But, as Paul Campos noticed in his Jurismania, "… almost nothing
recommended by well-intentioned academics ever happens." All these excellent
books usually do not make bestsellers' lists, unlike the ones that deal with
specific juicy and emotionally charged cases (e.g. A Civil Action, by
Jonathan Harr, or all the accounts of the O.J. Simpson trial, and other high
profile criminal cases). Therefore, the message of "well-intentioned
academics" does not get into the general public's consciousness.

In the Foreword to Max Boot's book, Robert Bork states: "[…] laymen rarely
have a complete understanding of what is taking place and those lawyers who
do, by and large, become cynically accepting of a system they do not admire
but have learned how to work, or at least to live, with." Lawyers'
complacence is unsettling. Robert W. Gordon, a Stanford Law School professor
and a reviewer of Anthony Kronman's book, states: "If lawyers could spare
any time to read, The Lost Lawyer [or any other of these books] should
really make them sit up and take notice of what has happened to them."

Practicing lawyers shrug these concerns off, and preoccupied with playing
the system well (i.e. to their own advantage) they would never waste time
reading all these alarming treatises. After all, to whom would they bill the
hours spent on the reading?

Only people like Chester Chalupowski of Salem, Massachusetts, deeply
wounded and traumatized by the injustices of the justice system, but still
struggling to make some sense out of the chaos and to see the bigger
picture, take the time to explore the matter, even if there is no good news,
especially, if there is no good news.


Excerpted from an essay by Dr. Margaret Koch-Nabialczyk, circulated on
the Internet December, 2004.  Dr. Koch-Nabialczyk lives in Beverly,
Massachusetts and can be reached by e-mail at mana6484@hotmail.com.  A full description of the Chester J. Chalupowski case can be found at Citizens for Judicial Accountability, http://www.judicialaccountability.org.

 




Legal Abuse Syndrome -- Las Vegas Review-Journal

Legal Abuse Syndrome -- Las Vegas Review-Journal

Judges and Mortgage Loans

Judges and Mortgage Loans