By: Jamie Barker
The attorney is not a lawyer.
While people use the terms interchangeably, even attorneys, they're two very different things.
The formal term for a lawyer is a counselor in law. We live in the law, and understand it well enough to counsel others about it.
The formal term for an attorney is an attorney at law. Attorneys live outside the law, and because of this they stand at law rather than in law. They claim to practice law professionally, though how they can do it from a chosen position outside the law is beyond me.The more traditional term for someone who is outside the law is an outlaw. I wonder how well attorneys would do if they put that on their business cards.
The word attorney comes from the Old French word "atourner", which means to transfer property from one party to another. More specifically, it historically refers to someone who acquaints a tenant to a new landlord. Amusingly, it has a nominal tertiary meaning from Greek which means "to twist".
Attorneys receive the British title of nobility "Esquire". The Esquire was the person who carried his knight's shield for him. As you'll find, this is the function attorneys have today as well. In the States, we threw out British rule over two hundred years ago. It crept right back in using legal doubletalk, systematically applied by attorneys in conjunction with legislators.
You don't have the right to an attorney.
When an officer reads you the Miranda Rights, he tells you that you have the right to an attorney. Not so! You have the right to counsel, but as we've seen attorneys are not counselors. (I'd have to check, but I don't know of anything that guarantees you the right to be lied to about the law by an outlaw.) Your right to a lawyer is typically denied because a) you're misled into thinking you have the right to an attorney, and b) because over the course of the past two hundred years attorneys have befuddled the citizenry about what a lawyer is, and so there are almost no true lawyers left these days.
The attorney's duty is to the court.
"His first duty is to the court, not to the client, and wherever the duties he owes to the client conflict with the duties he owes to the court, as an officer of the court in the administration of justice, the former must yield to the latter". Corpus Juris Secundum, Attorney & Client, Sec. 4, pg 802.
His first duty then is as an officer of the court. His second duty is to the public, meaning the status quo adopted by fifty percent of the citizens. Only after those two duties are satisfied does his duty to you ever come into play. So when you go to court you have two agents of the court haggling back and forth over the case in legalese, in front of a judge (or more properly, magistrate) that is an attorney who has outgrown the larval stage, and the point is the convenience of the magistrate. Part of that convenience is to convince you that justice is being done, that you have received a fair trial. But when this doesn't happen, often it's only the attorneys and magistrate who are educated enough to know it. (That being the case, we have a distinctly admirable number of honest judges left in the U.S.. What other profession does so well purely on the honor system?)
When the attorney represents you, the court considers you mentally incompetent.
CLIENT. A client is one who applies to a lawyer or counselor for advice and direction in a question of law, or commits his cause to his management in presenting a claim or defending against a suit in a court of justice; one who retains the attorney, is responsible to him for his fees, and to whom the attorney is responsible for the management of the suit; one who communicates facts to an attorney expecting professional advice. Clients are also called “wards of the court” in gard to their relationship with their attorneys. Corpus Juris Secundum, 1980, Section 4.
There is an old maxim, or truism, of law which states, "Ignorance of the law is no excuse." That is because under the American common law, you were free to do anything you liked so long as you didn't harm anyone else's life, liberty, or property, and so long as you abided by any contracts you chose to make. Obviously anyone who couldn't grasp that very simple premise was a mental invalid.
Today, the American common law has been wallpapered over with all kinds of bogus legislation. But the maxim remains unchallenged. Thus, when you go to court and have an attorney represent you because you do not know the law, the judge takes silent notice of this and presumes you to be mentally incompetent. As such, it's the court's duty to care for invalids, and thus you are considered to be a ward of the court - specifically, a ward of your attorney for the purposes of the trial. This ends up being very convenient for the court indeed, as the attorney - one of the officers of the court, you'll recall - is considered to be your legal guardian. Now that the court has adopted you, all that remains is the verdict.
"Legal" is not "lawful".
Law has to do with authority, justly expressed and in harmony with a greater authority.
Legal, legislation, and legalism come from "legis". They're terms of bureaucracy. Today most people think that if there's a piece of legislation or a court ruling, it's automatically valid law. Not so! If all the forms are dated, signed by the right parties, sent in on time to the right people, then you have legality. But to also have law, it must have the valid authority behind it.
In the U.S., the government was created by the People, and the People delegated a small amount of limited authorities to the government. Anything the People didn't give to the government, the government didn't have. Over the last two hundred years, government has been purporting to have authorities we never knowingly gave it. Now, when a legislator signs a bit of legislation prohibiting people from smoking downtown for instance, people tend to assume that it's valid law. But he could have signed anything, even an article from The Onion, and his signing it wouldn't make it law. Without valid authority from the People, our legislator hasn't created new law. He's just added yet another piece of dead legislation to the pile. The problem is that today's citizens now believe whatever he's just signed is valid law, and so the public outcry is minimal.
Legal is defined as something which "has the form and appearance of law, without necessarily having the substance of it". Indeed! Counterfeit law, in other words. This is why attorneys constantly argue whether something is legal or illegal. "Did it seem lawful, or did it seem unlawful?" I don't care whether something's legal or illegal, whether it seems lawful or not... I care whether or not it's actually lawful
While people use the terms interchangeably, even attorneys, they're two very different things.
The formal term for a lawyer is a counselor in law. We live in the law, and understand it well enough to counsel others about it.
The formal term for an attorney is an attorney at law. Attorneys live outside the law, and because of this they stand at law rather than in law. They claim to practice law professionally, though how they can do it from a chosen position outside the law is beyond me.The more traditional term for someone who is outside the law is an outlaw. I wonder how well attorneys would do if they put that on their business cards.
The word attorney comes from the Old French word "atourner", which means to transfer property from one party to another. More specifically, it historically refers to someone who acquaints a tenant to a new landlord. Amusingly, it has a nominal tertiary meaning from Greek which means "to twist".
Attorneys receive the British title of nobility "Esquire". The Esquire was the person who carried his knight's shield for him. As you'll find, this is the function attorneys have today as well. In the States, we threw out British rule over two hundred years ago. It crept right back in using legal doubletalk, systematically applied by attorneys in conjunction with legislators.
You don't have the right to an attorney.
When an officer reads you the Miranda Rights, he tells you that you have the right to an attorney. Not so! You have the right to counsel, but as we've seen attorneys are not counselors. (I'd have to check, but I don't know of anything that guarantees you the right to be lied to about the law by an outlaw.) Your right to a lawyer is typically denied because a) you're misled into thinking you have the right to an attorney, and b) because over the course of the past two hundred years attorneys have befuddled the citizenry about what a lawyer is, and so there are almost no true lawyers left these days.
The attorney's duty is to the court.
"His first duty is to the court, not to the client, and wherever the duties he owes to the client conflict with the duties he owes to the court, as an officer of the court in the administration of justice, the former must yield to the latter". Corpus Juris Secundum, Attorney & Client, Sec. 4, pg 802.
His first duty then is as an officer of the court. His second duty is to the public, meaning the status quo adopted by fifty percent of the citizens. Only after those two duties are satisfied does his duty to you ever come into play. So when you go to court you have two agents of the court haggling back and forth over the case in legalese, in front of a judge (or more properly, magistrate) that is an attorney who has outgrown the larval stage, and the point is the convenience of the magistrate. Part of that convenience is to convince you that justice is being done, that you have received a fair trial. But when this doesn't happen, often it's only the attorneys and magistrate who are educated enough to know it. (That being the case, we have a distinctly admirable number of honest judges left in the U.S.. What other profession does so well purely on the honor system?)
When the attorney represents you, the court considers you mentally incompetent.
CLIENT. A client is one who applies to a lawyer or counselor for advice and direction in a question of law, or commits his cause to his management in presenting a claim or defending against a suit in a court of justice; one who retains the attorney, is responsible to him for his fees, and to whom the attorney is responsible for the management of the suit; one who communicates facts to an attorney expecting professional advice. Clients are also called “wards of the court” in gard to their relationship with their attorneys. Corpus Juris Secundum, 1980, Section 4.
There is an old maxim, or truism, of law which states, "Ignorance of the law is no excuse." That is because under the American common law, you were free to do anything you liked so long as you didn't harm anyone else's life, liberty, or property, and so long as you abided by any contracts you chose to make. Obviously anyone who couldn't grasp that very simple premise was a mental invalid.
Today, the American common law has been wallpapered over with all kinds of bogus legislation. But the maxim remains unchallenged. Thus, when you go to court and have an attorney represent you because you do not know the law, the judge takes silent notice of this and presumes you to be mentally incompetent. As such, it's the court's duty to care for invalids, and thus you are considered to be a ward of the court - specifically, a ward of your attorney for the purposes of the trial. This ends up being very convenient for the court indeed, as the attorney - one of the officers of the court, you'll recall - is considered to be your legal guardian. Now that the court has adopted you, all that remains is the verdict.
"Legal" is not "lawful".
Law has to do with authority, justly expressed and in harmony with a greater authority.
Legal, legislation, and legalism come from "legis". They're terms of bureaucracy. Today most people think that if there's a piece of legislation or a court ruling, it's automatically valid law. Not so! If all the forms are dated, signed by the right parties, sent in on time to the right people, then you have legality. But to also have law, it must have the valid authority behind it.
In the U.S., the government was created by the People, and the People delegated a small amount of limited authorities to the government. Anything the People didn't give to the government, the government didn't have. Over the last two hundred years, government has been purporting to have authorities we never knowingly gave it. Now, when a legislator signs a bit of legislation prohibiting people from smoking downtown for instance, people tend to assume that it's valid law. But he could have signed anything, even an article from The Onion, and his signing it wouldn't make it law. Without valid authority from the People, our legislator hasn't created new law. He's just added yet another piece of dead legislation to the pile. The problem is that today's citizens now believe whatever he's just signed is valid law, and so the public outcry is minimal.
Legal is defined as something which "has the form and appearance of law, without necessarily having the substance of it". Indeed! Counterfeit law, in other words. This is why attorneys constantly argue whether something is legal or illegal. "Did it seem lawful, or did it seem unlawful?" I don't care whether something's legal or illegal, whether it seems lawful or not... I care whether or not it's actually lawful
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