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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (136621)	4/15/2010 12:45:53 AM
From: Sam	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 542950

Lawyers can do it well or badly. As can non-lawyers. Intelligence and the ability to think and reflect is as important as being a lawyer. If you aren't a lawyer, the biggest difficulties will be hiring the right clerks and wading through the dense jargon. Or getting a good legal assistant who will translate the jargon into English, and making you aware of the relevant precedents and the opposing POVs/arguments.

To: Bread Upon The Water who wrote (136621)	4/15/2010 2:16:33 AM
From: Sam	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 542950

Here is a fine example of legal reasoning, taken from Wiki's narrative of Plessey and one lawyer's 20th century response to it when he was a law clerk in 1952, shortly before it was overturned by Brown: Jim Crow legislation related to voting would quietly disenfranchise the Southern African American by requiring of prospective voters proof of land ownership or literacy tests at poll stations. Most African Americans were for the most part uneducated former slaves often leasing land from their formers owners and immediately lost their constitutionally guaranteed right to participate in the political system. Black community leaders who had achieved brief political success during the Reconstruction era lost any gains made when their voters disappeared. Historian Rogers Smith noted on the subject “lawmakers frequently admitted, indeed boasted, that such measures as complex registration rules, literacy and property tests, poll taxes, white primaries, and grandfather clauses were designed to produce an electorate confined to a white race that declared itself supreme”, notably rejecting the 14th and 15th Amendments to the American Constitution [11]. The “separate but equal” doctrine would characterize American society until the doctrine was ultimately overturned during the 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. William Rehnquist wrote a memo called "A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases" when he was a law clerk in 1952, during early deliberations that led to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. In his memo, Rehnquist argued that "I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by 'liberal' colleagues but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed." He continued, "To the argument… that a majority may not deprive a minority of its constitutional right, the answer must be made that while this is sound in theory, in the long run it is the majority who will determine what the constitutional rights of the minority are."[12][13] en.wikipedia.org Rehnquist was like a legal genius, all right. A sound understanding of the Constitution, lol.