ABA President Silkenat: America's legal response to gun violence is unacceptable

ABA President Silkenat: America's legal response to gun violence is unacceptable

Which shows just how far the ABA has strayed from its original mission, and how whopping irrelevant it now is to the lives of average lawyers.

The ABA started off as a (conservative) organization seeking to regulate the unrestricted practice of law.  It was concerned that the rough and tumble nature of the practice, which had existed in its frontier regions from nearly day one, lead to be the law being regarded with disdain. It sought to elevate the practice, and actually to boost its esteem to the level of physicians.  As part of that, it emphasized professionalism, and it came to also review Federal judicial nominees and rate law schools.

Well, just like other organizations, it's in decline.  Part of this is for the same reasons fraternal organizations are in decline (see also the recent post on the Boy Scouts).  Part of it is also for the reasons that labor unions are in decline.  The ABA achieved what it sought to do many, many year ago. So it isn't really needed to achieve htat goal, only to maintain it.

But organizations that started off with a cause rarely disband when the cause is achieved. They just move on to a new one, and that's what the ABA has done.  It's morphed from a conservative organization concerned with practice standards, to one which is now a liberal organization ready to espouse liberal causes.

The problem with that is that a political cause is a political cause, and most legal practitioners are working in the nuts and bolts of the law.  Practitioners are more concerned with developments in tort law, criminal law, civil procedure, and the like.  As for social causes, lawyers have their own views like everyone else.  Some of those views are grounded in legal interpretation, some in social views, and some in emotion.

Hopefully lawyers involved in social causes, and more particularly legal organizations involved in them, do try to keep the law in mind, but here the ABA is frankly just out to lunch.  A person can argue one way or another about gun control, but a legal organization that argues about it should keep the law in mind, and either accept it or argue that it, and by it we have to mean the Constitution here, be changed.  It's weak legal reasoning to argue that a strained reading of the Constitution ought to be the approach taken.

Beyond that, frankly this is a policy issue that has nothing really to do with the law as law.  Lawyers don't have much business saying "I'm a lawyer, and therefore I know that this should be the policy."  And this has nothing to do with what almost every lawyer in the US actually does for a living.