I've been really critical of the Ivy League law schools here from time to time, with a lot of that criticism being that graduating from these schools has become the right of passage into non work in the legal field in a way that makes their utility to the actual field of law doubtful.
Indeed, it's become uniquely destructive in some ways, but only as a focused part of what a recent critic of law and the baby boom generation has otherwise noted. The overproduction of lawyers starting in the 1970s and the liberalization of legal education in the same period has created an anti democratic class of lawyers more or less imbued with the Napoleonic concept of creating a liberal society through force, although in their case the field of battle is the courts rather than some poor farmer's wheat field.
A good example of this is the recent lawsuit against the National Rifle Association by New York's Attorney General Letitia James.
James is a Harvard law graduate who is the elected Attorney General of New York. A member of the Working Families Party and the Democratic Party, James is a left wing activist who has never worked in private practice, but rather has served in her state's AG's office and for her state's legislature for years.
The lawsuit is political.
I haven't looked at the details, but it would appear doubtful that there's a good grounds for standing for New York to sue the NRA. If its court's uphold the bringing of the suit, it would say something disturbing about them and the state of the law in New York. The most probable result of the suit is to flood the coffers of the NRA with donations, demonstrate to American firearms owners that the Democrats really are out to take their guns, and to be an expensive embarrassment to New York. In some real ways, the suit couldn't have come at a better time for the NRA no matter what happens. It's going to survive and profit from this.
It won't impact James in any fashion as she'll gain liberal credit, no matter what happens.
All of this is not to say that there aren't some obvious problems with the organization of the National Rifle Association. The last few years its internal organization has been disarray with long time firms that have worked for it having severed their connections for one reason or another, and with significant staffers departing under odd circumstances. Last year there was rumor of an attempted coup in the leadership of the NRA, and frankly it's due for a change. Under Wayne LaPierre the organization has become increasingly hardcore in its views which in recent years is hurting it and which has somewhat alienated firearms owners who are not on the AR15 end of ownership. It's been successful in holding the line on litigation, and very successful in the courts, but there's a real sense that things are likely to change soon.
Part of the reason that's the case is that the NRA, in 2016, completely aligned itself with Donald Trump in a way that was extremely unwise. By doing that, it abandoned a policy it was abandoning anyhow of supporting politicians of either party who were pro gun. That direction became apparent during President Obama's administration as President Obama took no action in this area at all and yet was still criticized. That Trump was likely to be a heavily polarizing President was obvious from the onset and now, four years later, it looks almost inevitable that he will be defeated and possible that the Senate will change hands. If this is the case, the NRA will have no Democratic allies in Congress whatsoever.
Another part of the reason for this is that at this point the NRA, in the form of LaPierre, is like politics itself and has become dominated by Baby Boomers who should have left some time ago. LaPierre is 70 years old and really past the point where he should be leading the organization. A change in leadership really should have come at least a decade ago, which is likewise true of the political leadership of both parties. The leadership of the NRA, like the leadership of the political parties, has ossified in a way that is now hurting it.
The lawsuit won't change that. But the upcoming election may. Firearms owners in the US really have nowhere else to go to as all competing organizations are much more to the right of the NRA and they therefore don't attract the loyalty of firearms owners at large.
But, fwiw, the NRA has more or less been through this before. In the 1960s and 1970s the organization struggled with how to deal with new gun control provisions that had just come in, with the existing leadership being willing to accomodate them at the time That lead to a type of coup in the organization then, which put in the more or less current leadership. Chances are good that there will be a changing of the guard soon.
Something that shows no sign of chaning, however, is the vast overproduction of law school graduates by American law schools. It was thought that a depression in the industry would address that, but it hasn't. Indeed, the ABA has been lobbying to suspend in person bar exams this year, when the sane approach, which we'll deal with later, is just to place a hiatus on new bar memberships in general for the remainder of the pandemic, and then tighten up admission standards in general. That's not going to happen, however.
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