Regardless of how the average person may feel about it on a surface level, I think it's absolutely critical that congress has so many lawyers elected. These people write laws, we need people who actually understand the way law works doing that job.
Regardless of how the average person may feel about it on a surface level, I think it's absolutely critical that congress has so many lawyers elected. These people write laws, we need people who actually understand the way law works doing that job.
Elected representatives do not write laws. Their legislative aides write the laws. While some state governments have highly professionalized legislative aides, in the federal government, such positions are typically poorly paid stepping stone jobs filled by people in their late 20s/early 30s who have little domain expertise.
Not true.
The majority of the bills are written by lobbyists. Most of the bills introduced are so called "copycat" bills.
USA TODAY and the Republic found at least 10,000 bills almost entirely copied from model legislation were introduced nationwide in the past eight years, and more than 2,100 of those bills were signed into law.
Special interests sometimes work to create the illusion of expert endorsements, public consensus or grassroots support. One man testified as an expert in 13 states to support a bill that makes it more difficult to sue for asbestos exposure. In several states, lawmakers weren’t told that he was a member of the organization that wrote the model legislation on behalf of the asbestos industry, the American Legislative Exchange Council.
https://publicintegrity.org/politics/state-politics/copy-pas...
That is good for the form, OTOH the content (objet of the law, which is almost more important, one can argue) is more often that not, not related to the field where lawyers are experts (from sociology to engineering, through economics and medicine) that is typically handled by expert’s consultants, comities, etc.
So bottom line, I’m not so sure is so important that representatives are laywers. Maybe a good mix should be ok?
Maybe it is time to change how laws work if you need trained experts to understand them. Seems extremely harmful to everyone else who is not lawyer.
Any adversarial system that exists for a long time has such issues. Go pull up the rulebook for any professional sport.
Ambiguities get adjudicated and then built into the next version of the rulebook and so it goes with laws. Terms are given specific meaning over time by court decision and are used as boilerplate.
In practice it creates a very strong incentive to write laws in a way that reinforces the "rule of lawyers", creating an exclusionary positive feedback loop.
Given that legalese is still commonly prone to interpretation. I‘d rather have more Mathematics and Computer science people to ensure proper logic in the texts ;-)
might as well throw in some "red team" types to propose potential loopholes/grey areas.
Aren't most of those lawyers the select few that can afford to go into politics?
Our elected reps neither write nor even read the laws that are passed. Laws are written by lobbyists and aides, if we're lucky with direction from the representatives.