11 September 1998

Over the last century a trend has emerged in our culture that has not been seen before. It is hard to describe, but for want of a better term I will call it the Culture of Victims. The basic phenomenon is a tendency for individuals and cultural groups to blame all their problems on some external factor. For example, wife beaters are often portrayed by their lawyers as not being responsible for their actions because they were beaten by their fathers as a child. This trend is seen in other ways as well. Minority racial groups excuse their poor performance in schools and in industry because they were raised in poverty and were not taught proper behavior.

The interesting thing about this trend is that it runs counter to a basic tenant of this country. One of the first 10 amendments to our Constitution is that each individual is free to do as he pleases unless otherwise proscribed by law. There have been severe limits put on the government as to what it can and can't do to limit the behavior of the individual. Along with that freedom, however, is the parallel idea that each individual is also responsible for his own actions.

... continued 9 November 1998

One question that has been puzzling me is, where did this trend come from? A possible answer is that we have way too many lawyers. We have become overly litigious. To use an older term, we law one another too often. I have read that we have many more lawyers per capita than most countries do, by a large amount. (Naturally, I can't quote the statistics.) This situation probably did not arise out of any conspiracy. Our society is increasingly complex, and situations arise every day that never arose before. It takes a large body of intelligent, well educated people to help sort this all out.

Unfortunately, along the way we have produced a passel of ambulance chasers as well - so many that one of the larger bodies of humor now deals with lawyer jokes. (I am tempted to insert my favorite here. Maybe I will attach it to the end.) These lower echelon lawyers need work too, so they spend their days approaching everyone who is written up in the paper and explain that they can probably get some serious money by claiming somebody else caused their problem. They will file suite against anybody. They charge fees that are contingent on their winning. Thus the "victim" has nothing to loose in filing the suite no matter how frivolous his claim.

We used to have a theory called "contributory negligence". If you dropped an axe and cut off your foot you were probably a large part of the problem. Nowadays we would sue the manufacturer for making it too sharp and the store that sold it for not warning us that it was dangerous and the person walking by in the street for distracting us and the emergency medical team for failing to treat us promptly enough to prevent the loss of the foot. We would sue them all on the theory that one of them would have enough money to buy us off.

One thing that encourages this trend is the price of litigation. By filing motion after motion an attorney that couldn't find his behind with both hands and a head start can tie up competent (and high-priced) attorneys who work for larger firms) for long and expensive delays. Therefore, clients with lots of money are encouraged to "pay off" claims even though they are known to be frivolous, on the grounds that the client stands to loose more money in the long run by fighting the case. This is a modern form of blackmail. It probably ought to be illegal. Naturally, most of the people that are in our legislatures are attorneys, so there is little chance of much in the way of reform in this area in the near future.