Would things be better in California if more state legislators were lawyers? A recent article in The Bar Journal seems to suggest that they would be.
“I think it definitely matters if there are lawyers in the legislature,” concurs State Bar President Holly Fujie. “Lawyers understand how laws are interpreted by the courts and by lawyers and how a single word in a statute can make an enormous difference in the way that it is interpreted. Lawyers can anticipate problems with statutory language and help to avoid them. When lawyers draft statutory language, they are aware of terms of art and of usage and can make the language clearer.”
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Assembly Judiciary Committee Chairman Mike Feuer agrees that the “paucity of lawyers in the legislature has some important consequences.” A number of lawmakers, he says, voted against bonds for court construction because of the Supreme Court’s decision supporting gay marriage. “In general, that approach reflects a lack of understanding about how important the independence of the judiciary is,” Feuer says.
Despite the widespread derision we receive, most lawyers genuinely believe they are uniquely positioned to improve the way our society works, and we do what we can to help achieve that end. And, having seen directly the kinds of problems that the Legislature can cause for the citizens who have to follow their statutes, I have to agree that having more lawyers in the Legislature is probably a good thing.
A lot of people seem to think of lawyers as mercenaries, but I think the lawyerly arts are best and most efficiently deployed as preventive measures. Legislation is essentially a letter in a bottle, written by the legislators of today for the citizens of tomorrow. A law that might seem clear today might find itself beset with troublesome vagueness tomorrow, when somebody has to interpret the message and figure out how it applies to a situation that the Legislature may not have anticipated. But lawyers are often professional writers of letters in bottles, in the form of contracts, wills, court orders, and any documents that must be interpreted later.