Justin is no lawyer — and that’s good!

As fate has it, I happen to be a lawyer by training. This ruined whatever potential I might have had as a writer, for many lawyers are ruined writers. I say “ruined” because when you are forced to think and write like a lawyer, your thought processes end up being captive to a different language — a stultifying thought police that forces you to qualify, quantify, justify almost everything in a mercilessly redundant manner — as if in anticipation of litigation of your very thought processes. That sort of mental corruption leads to a very different sort of writing style than whatever style would have evolved had the writer’s brain not been subjected to the numbing torments of legalese.
But hell, my legal career was interrupted by a decade of death and reactive self-degeneration, so it’s easier for me to be at war with my legal self than for many of my brethren.
The stuff in which I’ve been steeped the past few days reminds me of the yawning abyss from which I escaped by falling into a much worse abyss.
And what an abyss it is! Listening in contemplation of the terrible fates which can befall any business owner unlucky enough to become an “employer” in California almost made me sit down and cry. Except alas, I paid for the damned course, and there was no time for tears! My purpose was to sit and listen so that I could obtain the qualifying MCLE hours. But it was just awful to hear that nearly everything — including a hangnail (which prompted a serious “Don’t laugh!” from the lawyer/lecturer!) — can be considered a “disability” under California law, and employers are liable for “discrimination” if they fail to make accommodations. If a sexual comment is made in the workplace, anyone can be aggrieved, not just the party to whom it was directed. This went on and on, and I felt the way I felt years ago when Berkeley instituted rent control and some smartass lawyer asked me why anyone in his right mind would want to be a landlord in Berkeley. (I wasn’t in my right mind, so did I mind?)
And why would anyone want to be an employer in California? Or own a business in California? Ask the lawyers. Here’s a typical example I found yesterday in a local freebie:

JUST A FEW years ago, small retailers in San Francisco began noticing a disturbing trend. Plaintiff attorneys had started using federal and state disabled-access laws to make an easy buck off local merchants. They would go around looking for building-code violations, such as doorways that were too narrow or shopping aisles that were too close together. Then they would file suit and push for a quick settlement. For hundreds of small businesses that weren’t prepared for all this, the consequences cost them thousands of dollars.

Lawyers, of course, can fight all of the problems which lawyers cause.
But it costs lots of money, and it doesn’t generate much good writing.
Justin, however, is not a lawyer, and his writing doesn’t suffer from the legalistic clutter that plagues mine.
(Self ridicule via legalistic parody of language is often my only resort, as the best defense is a good offense! Justin doesn’t suffer from this self-imposed neurotic need to be so defensively analytical and superfluously redundant.)


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4 responses to “Justin is no lawyer — and that’s good!”

  1. Harkonnendog Avatar

    No offense here, but this stuff about lawyering blowing your potential to be a writer is bs. Scott Turrow and John Grisham would disagree. Anyway, you are an excellent writer. People aren’t visiting your site everyday to look at your doggie.
    Not that you’re as screwed up as me, but here’s how I finally got through writing my first novel. I’d open two MS Word documents every day. The 1st was the novel. The 2nd was a journal where I identified all the reasons (or excuses or rationalizations or whatever) I was using to make myself stop working on the novel. The 2nd one ended up just as long as the first one, lol.

  2. Wittysexkitten Avatar

    Yeah you know you that damn legalese is creating a problem your blog contains phrases like “necessary or sufficient.” Or, in the reverse, when your writing a brief and the brief contains words like “totally” and “so anyways.” I seem to mix the two worlds up rather frequently.

  3. Steven Malcolm Anderson (Cato theElder) the Lesbian-worshipping man's-man-admiring myth-based egoist Avatar

    I am not now nor have I ever been a lawyer, though I do know enough law to know that I’ll probably be locked up if I commit certain crimes. har! har! Anyway, your writing is excellent. Your _style_!
    As to the employer, I will only quote:
    “….It is evil to be an employer. We have no employment to offer….”
    -John Galt
    -Ayn Rand, “Atlas Shrugged”

  4. B. Durbin Avatar

    I can’t remember which proposition was dealing with those lawsuits, but it required an actual aggrieved party to bring one.
    Don’t remember if it passed, either. (I *do* remember that someone hit my parents’ car in the parking lot, because when I left to get lunch the only place to park upon returning was in a slot that was vunerable on three sides, and they ended up having to call the polling office to come pick up the ballots because the loading pressed the fender into the tire and was slicing it up.)