Is the accused represented by counsel?

First, we hang all the lawyers.
- William Shakespeare
Somewhere along the line, we Americans stopped worshipping heroes and started adoring anti-heroes; a Hollywood term which, loosely defined, means “a guy who doesn’t play by the rules or respect much of anything or anybody but accomplishes some really neat stuff by playing dirty and it all turns out all right in the end.”
This affliction is particularly epidemic among members of the legal profession. I don’t have anything personally against lawyers, in fact there are a few I genuinely admire. But it certainly would improve my relations with the species if I didn’t keep encountering people who say the lawyer for the Arkansas School Board Association or the Arkansas Municipal League or some other co-operative crowd of legal advisors told them it was okay to do something that either dances around the edges of ethical behavior or flat out charges across the border.
I have to believe this information could only be disbursed under one of three possible circumstances: 1) The stupid shyster so-and-so didn’t have a clue of what he was talking about; 2) He is bored with his mundane legal career and wants to be more like the lawyers he sees on tv or at the movies who go dashing into perilous situations, doing very un-lawyerly things at the risk of life, limb and disbarment to save their marginally guilty clients, or 3) He’s trying to justify his continued employment by hustling up as much litigation as he possibly can by giving his clients very shaky legal advice.
No one incident prompted this tirade, gentle readers, its just that I believe the rest of us, who aren’t members of that privileged and scholarly class of superior humans who hold law degrees, get a little bit tired of being taken for fools. Ever noticed how many lawyers there are in state legislatures and the U.S. Congress? Or how it is all but impossible for a regular person to understand what the devil the language in a written law means? Did it ever occur to you that it is a very bad idea to let lawyers make laws?
Here’s a shock. Most of the guys we call the founding fathers of this country weren’t lawyers and they still seemed to do a pretty good job. There were lawyers among them, fellows like John Adams and James Monroe were practicing attorneys, and no less a personage than Thomas Jefferson was licensed to do so, although he never made his living that way. Most of them, though, were businessmen, farmers and tradesmen of one sort or another. Jefferson considered himself a farmer, though he spent little time at the work, you could have your pick of about a dozen different occupations in the case of Benjamin Franklin, although he considered himself a printer, and Roger Sherman of Connecticut was a cobbler, for heaven’s sake. For those of you who are too young to have come into contact with that term, a cobbler is someone who makes and repairs shoes.
If a farmer, a printer and a shoe maker could come up with stuff like the Bill of Rights over two centuries ago, who’s to say they couldn’t do just as well now, given the opportunity.
Consider Harry Truman, a failed haberdasher from Missouri who may not have been our best president, but certainly ranks in the top ten. And our worst president? Opinions vary, but I’ll bet whoever you rank at the bottom of the presidential pile, was a graduate of one of our nation’s many, many law schools.