Hearsay

Human events provide devil's playgrounds for the sardonic disparagement of individuals and institutions by the misguided. Whether a lawyer joke is a product of jealousy, of protest, or of vengeance, the thrust usually defies riposte.

Vice President Dick Cheney took his lumps from the mercilessly mirthful after that hunting accident in Texas. The worst of it was that although he couldn't find weapons of mass destruction, he was able to bag a 78-year-old lawyer.

Said Jay the Lampooner Leno, “When people heard (Cheney) shot a lawyer, his popularity is now 92 percent.” Republicans might praise that as positive spin, but the sting is as nettlesome as the real birdshot.

Every lawyer should be just as perturbed whenever any part of the main, the legal profession, gets diminished by flippancy. The “no man is an island” analogy was a rallying plea during proceedings of the ABA House of Delegates in Chicago on February 13.

Delegates adopted unanimously a Statement of Core Principles that bind and bond legal professionals around the world. An attack on one is an attack on us all, said the speaker, and the bell will toll for the profession if we don't defend core principles on behalf of people everywhere.

Drafted by ABA President Michael Greco for presentation during an international meeting of bar presidents last November at the Maison du Barreau in Paris, the statement had to be simple to gain assent from such a diverse multitude.

Simple, but eloquent, to wit: The legal profession throughout the world, in the interest of the public, is committed to these core principles.

* An impartial, and independent, judiciary, without which there is no rule of law.

* An independent legal profession, without which there is no rule of law or freedom for the people.

* Access to justice for all people throughout the world, which is only possible with an independent legal profession and an impartial, and independent, judiciary.

Greco's statement concludes, pointedly: “And that these core principles shall not yield to any emergency of the moment.”

The principles so stated may be too high and mighty to work into the conversation at a cocktail party or PTA meeting, but the message to the mockers might go something like this.

None but the lawyers are committed to protecting the liberties of people in this country, and to securing liberty for the oppressed and persecuted elsewhere on Earth.

Lawyers would be redundant if the ongoing and upcoming tasks were easy, but they're not. Read on.

This, the state motto of South Dakota, may come back to haunt its legal community if a proposed Judicial Accountability Initiative Law (JAIL) is approved later this year as an amendment to the state constitution (www.jail4judges.org).

JAIL is touted as a grassroots attempt “to end the rampant and pervasive judicial corruption” by granting accountability to the people through special grand juries that “shall have the power to strip judges of their protection of judicial immunity... and to investigate, indict and initiate criminal prosecution of wayward judges.”

Something about the nation's upper plains seems to foment despair with institutions. Perhaps it's a lingering backlash from descendants of the forsaken homesteaders who froze and starved in railroad ghost towns in the Badlands a century ago.

Take for example jury nullification, a proposal to allow jurors to be informed that they can disregard any law they don't like. It was on the South Dakota ballot four years ago. A Libertarian group from Montana, the Fully Informed Jury Association (FIJA), was able to amass the requisite 34,000 citizen signatures.

The FIJA jury nullification amendment failed in the Coyote State, as had other attempts in Arizona and Oklahoma, but the issue has popped up in Alaska and Colorado, and was the subject of a corroborative letter in the Chicago Sun-Times in January.

Last December, the South Dakota secretary of state stopped counting when signatures in support of the JAIL proposal surpassed the 33,456 necessary to take it to the voters in November. State Bar President Bob Riter wrote that “it would likely destroy the current independent nature of our judiciary.”

The effect of JAIL “is to allow those who are disappointed with a judicial result to challenge the court outside of our existing legal processes,” Riter added. He called on members of the bar to “speak as one voice against that effort.”

Amen to that for lawyers everywhere. South Dakota is not an island, but a share of the sovereign main. JAIL, although some may perceive it as the whimsy of buffoons, is not a joke.