Monday at the bar: Judge Posner takes shots at the entire legal system (and the ABA notes the Blue Book)

Judge Posner, the well known Federal appellate jurist, has been taking shots at the entire legal profession, including the judiciary, recently.  Given his stature and prominence, it's worth noting what he's saying.

Most recently  he's doing this in a series of articles in something called The Green Bag.  I have no idea what the Green Bag is, and what the source of its odd name is, but the article really lights from fires.  He starts off taking on the much repeated pablum about our system being the envy of the world.

Another way to characterize the legal profession in all three of its major branches the academy, the judiciary, and the bar is that it is complacent,self satisfied. Chief Justice Roberts in his annual reports likes to describe the American legal system as the envy of the world. Nonsense. The system has proved itself ineffectual in dealing with a host of problems, ranging from providing useful (as distinct from abstract theoretical) legal training at bearable cost to curbing crime and meting out rational punishment, providing representation for and protection of the vast number of Americans who are impecunious or commercially unsophisticated (so prey to sharpies), incorporating the insights of the social and natural sciences (with the notable exception of economics, however), curbing incompetent regulatory agencies such as the immigration and social security disability agencies, and limiting the role of partisan politics in the appointment of judges. The system is also immensely costly (more than $400 billion a year), with its million lawyers, many overpaid, many deficient in training and experience, some of questionable ethics.

Wow.

That lays it on pretty thick, but in so far as our system being the "envy" of the world, Posner is right.  It might have been when much of the world didn't have a truly independent judiciary, but there's no reason to believe it is now.  He goes on to take on the entire adversarial system.  That's really amazing from an American legal writer, and he does a good job of describing the system in other countries.

Here's the comment that the ABA noticed and linked into their listserve:

There are changes at once desirable and feasible to be made at the federal court of appeals level too, some of form and some of substance.  At the level of form, the first thing to do is burn all copies of the Bluebook, in its latest edition 560 pages of rubbish, a terrible time waster for law clerks employed by judges who insist as many do that the citations in their opinions conform to the Bluebook; also for students at the Yale Law School who aspire to be selected for the staff of the Yale Law Journal they must pass a five hour exam on the Bluebook. Yet no serious reader pays attention to citation format; all the reader cares about is that the citation enable him or her to find the cited material. Just by reading judicial opinions law students learn how to cite cases, statutes, books, and articles; they don’t need a citation treatise. In the office manual that I give my law clerks only two pages are devoted to citation format.

Oh my.

And he goes on from there.