The Battle of Beersheba (Be'er Sheva, בְּאֵר שֶׁבַע, بئر السبع,) October 31, 1917

Today in the centennial of one of the most dramatic events of the Great War, the Battle of Beersheba (or as it is sometimes called Be'er Sheva), culminating the Charge of the Australian Light Horse that took the town.

CC BY-SA 3.0 au.  File:Palestine Gallery at the Australian War Memorial (MG 9693).jpg.  Creative Commons on Wikipedia.

The mounted assault by the 4th and 12th Australian Light Horse is one of the seminal events of Australian history and, by any measure, one of the most dramatic events of the Great War.  What it is not, however, is the "last" charge by a body of mounted men (the Light Horse were not cavalry, but mounted infantry), nor even the "last great charge" or "last full scale charge".  It wasn't even the last big charge of cavalry during World War One.  It was, however, a spectacular and successful use of mounted men in a very skillfully orchestrated Commonwealth battle in the desert.

Beersheba in 1917.

The battle came about as part of British Empire's advance north into Palestine, towards Jerusalem, during World War One.   As part of their war against the Ottoman Turks the British had decided to continually advance north, a decision that would ultimately take them all the way to Damascus during the course of the war in the desert.

 Edmund Allenby, the commander of British forces in the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in 1917.

Their problem in doing this is that the straight road to Jerusalem lead to Gaza and Gaza was heavily defended.  Therefore, the British, under the command of Edmund Allenby, determined to make a flanking move and that made Beersheba a goal of their flaking advance.

Map of the area in which the British were operating.  Note the importance of wells, which are marked on the map, including those at Beersheba.

The town of Beersheba is an ancient one, and was once quite isolated in the desert.  Always associated with well,  the name itself may mean the Well of the Oath as it is where the oath of Abraham and Abimelech was taken. Some claim, however, that the name means Seven Wells, which may refer to the multiple wells associated with the town, or it may be a way of signifying the importance of the town given the Bible emphasis on the number seven.  Some Arabic translations come across different yet, as Lion's Wells.  At any rate, the town has been there for an extremely long time.

 Abraham's Well at Beersheba, 1855.

The British plan called for a large right flaking move by mounted elements of the British expeditionary force.  Mounted troops were, contrary to widespread myth, used on every front during World War One, but as the war in the desert remained fairly mobile, they were particularly important there.  Allenby was, moreover, a cavalryman and well acquainted with mounted warfare.  In this instance the British committed The Desert Mounted Corps under the command of Australian Lieutenant General Sir Harry Chauvel which consisted of Australian and New Zealand Mounted Division (1st Light Horse, 2nd Light Horse and the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigades), The Australian Mounted Division (3rd Light Horse, 4th Light Horse and the 5th Mounted Brigade and the Yeomanry Mounted Division (6th Mounted, 8th Mounted and the 22nd Mounted Brigades) with the 7th Mounted and the Imperial Camel Corps held in reserve.  This was augmented by the addition of mounted units transferred from other British units prior to the battle.  Rather obviously, the mounted elements were quite substantial, although they were not not the only troops committed to the effort by any means and the infantry commitment was quite substantial.

 Chauvel with his officers.

The battle itself was part of the overall Battle of Gaza and it would not be correct that the British simply showed up at Beersheba and the battle ensued.  To even contemplate an effective attack at Beersheba preliminary positions on the line of advance had to be secured which did in fact happen.  Almost all of this was accomplished through substantial mounted action in advance of the main body of advancing troops.

The British forces were in position by the night of October 29-30 and a preparatory bombardment of the grossly outnumbered Turkish forces (British forces outnumbered the Turks over ten to one in the battle), which did have the advantage however of being dug in, commenced in the early morning of October 31.  The bombardment was effective on severing elements of the Turkish forces in place.  A British infantry and yeomanry assault was launched at 8:20 that succeeded in securing important areas of the high ground.  

The Desert Mounted Corps went into action at 0800 with attacks on strategic positions around Beersheba.  Due to the movie treatment of the battle its often imagined that only Australian mounted troops were at the battle and that they were kept in reserve all day in desperate conditions until called into battle at the lat moment.  In fact, Australian, New Zealand and British mounted troops were all in action all day long in the battle but were used in a way that their mobility would contemplate, taking positions around the main town while infantry, supported by cavalry, took positions immediately next to the town in order to prepare for a final assault of it.  The mounted actions throughout the day isolated the town in an effort to keep anything from reaching it, or escaping it.  This resulted in a situation where by 15:00 the town was effectively isolated and ready for a final assault.

 Opening of the Turkish railway station in Beersheba in 1915.  The railway station still stands in the town near a monument to the  Turkish combatants who fought there.  A monument to the Australian Light Horse also exists in the city of 200,000 residents today.

That's when what is so widely remembered about the battle, the mounted charge of the Australian Light Horse, occurred.

Upon taking final positions outside of the town, the Australian Light Horse were ordered to make a dismounted attack upon the Mosque in Beersheba.

It's important to keep in mind that the Light Horse were mounted infantry, not cavalry.  They were not equipped like cavalry, and the distinction between cavalry and mounted infantry, while it had declined in the British forces since the Boer War, was a real one yet.  Mounted infantrymen were equipped identically to infantrymen, being issued a Short Magazine Lee Enfield rifle, a rifle that was in the short rifle category deemed suitable for infantry and cavalry, and a bayonet. Cavalry, in contrast, also carried the SMLE but they were equipped with the traditional saber that cavalrymen had carried for generations (lance had been dispensed with for British cavalry quite some time prior, but they did remain in the cavalry of some other nations, including the Ottoman's.  Unlike American cavalry, which was more of a mixed force filing the role of mounted infantry and cavalry, British cavalrymen did not carry sidearms, although the cavalry forces of some other nations did.  Turkish cavalry in this period still carried the lance.

Mounted infantry had come in strong to British Empire forces during the Boer War where it had been found to be highly useful.  Indeed, there had been an Empire military debate on whether it was so effective that it had supplanted cavalry entirely, although that had not occurred.  The British Empire fielded both cavalry and mounted infantry during the Great War and both were present at Beersheba in the Desert Mounted Corps.

Shortly after the Australians determined to advance an order from Gen. Allenby to take Beersheba by nightfall also arrived.  The Australians soon began to contemplate a mounted assault on the town, something that they had contemplated as early as October 26, if the opportunity arose.  On that date, accordingly the order had gone out to have bayonets sharpened.

This may seem odd, but it was well known that sabers were a more effective weapon that rifles in a mounted charge.  A person can debate if sidearms were more effective yet, and the American Army felt they were, but the British retained the traditional belief that an edged weapon was superior for a cavalry charge.  The Light Horse lacked sabers but they were equipped with the British sword bayonet, an exceedingly long bayonet that in fact approached the short sword length.

British infantryman training in 1940 but still equipped with a SMLE rifle and sword bayonet.  Sword bayonets were common in World War One but the British pattern was very long even at that.

The decision was soon made to order a mounted charge by the 4th and 12th Light Horse Regiments.  The units had to cover four miles in order to achieve their objectives and under the circumstances, and given the terrain, a mounted charge was by far the most likely to succeed at the smallest cost to the advancing men.  To the post World War One mind, this seems to be an almost impossible conclusion, but it was the tactical reality of the day.  The men covering that four miles would be under fire from artillery, machine guns and massed rifle fire for much of it, and with no cover.  The best way to approach a problem like that was to cover the ground as quickly as possible.

Additionally it had been known for quite some time that the prospect of facing a charging mass of horses, and two regiments was a large number of horses was terrifying for the men enduring it and generally most infantry reacted poorly in that circumstance. The real difficult for mounted forces in the Great War, therefore, was not the new weaponry, such as automatic weapons.  Indeed, with the exception of aircraft and poisonous gas there wasn't anything new to the World War One battlefield that mounted troops hadn't faced before.  Rather, the real difficulty was the exceedingly decimated terrain and terrain obstacles that mooted horse mobility.  That factor wasn't present to the same extent in the desert.

The Australian Light Horse charge commenced after 16:00 with the first half mile of the charge covered at a walk. At that point the men were ordered into a trot and then, when Ottoman artillery opened up, they deployed at a gallop. The artillery proved ineffective as the Light Horse rapidly rode under the guns to where it could no longer be used. At that point Ottoman machine gun and rifle fire opened up but some of it was neutralized by British counter battery fire.  Machine gun fire and small arms fire proved less effective than might be supposed in part due to this but in part because, as has been well demonstrated, facing a mounted assault is terrifying and ground troops have rarely reacted well to it.

 4th Light Horse at Beersheba.  This photograph is often attributed to have been taken during the battle but in fact its suspected that this was taken soon after the battle when the events were reenacted for camera.  It was already appreciated how dramatic the battle had been.

Contrary to what is sometimes supposed the 4th Light Horse, upon reaching the trenches, dismounted and fought as ground skirmishers, true to their nature of being mounted infantry.  The trenches were taken by Light Horsemen fighting dismounted and their mounts were galloped off, as per the norm for such a deployment.  The 12th Light Horse, meanwhile fought at first mounted and dismounted into the town, but upon getting into it, fought dismounted.  While all of this was going on, additional mounted reserves were ordered into the battle to follow upon the 4th and 12ths success. The town was soon taken.

Most of the casualties in the overall battle were British infantry, not mounted men.  Casualties sustained in the Light Horse assault itself were light under the circumstances with more men being killed in close quarter combat on the ground rather than in the charge.  Most of the casualties in the charge were men wounded in action, rather than killed.

The battle is deservedly well remembered today and the Australian Light Horse is correctly attributed with valiant action on that day.  The emphasis on the Light Horse charge, and the somewhat inaccurate portrayal of the resulting combat, has tended however to skew the  history of the battle being accurately recalled, however.  In reality, the Light Horse combined with other mounted elements of the British forces were active throughout the entire offensive and their role was vital throughout.  The final Light Horse mounted assault took the town, but the overall effort had involved mounted troops from the onset in a highly competent and coordinated effort.

Remount Station, "Camp Lewis", Tacoma, Washington. October 31, 1917

Cotton farming in Georgia, October 31, 1917

Lex Anteinternet: Can somebody here explain Catalonia to me?

Lex Anteinternet: Can somebody here explain Catalonia to me?: On an average week we get quite a few views from France and Italy.  I'm not sure why, but we do. We also get an appreciable number fro...

I just didn't see this coming at all.  Now Catalonia had declared independence and Spain is acting to nullify it.

I also didn't realize that the Catalonian language is not a dialect of Spain, but its own Romance language.  I'm quite surprised, and part of my surprise is just the fact that such a regionally distinct language has been able to hold on for so long.

One of the old ones. . . Studebaker

Not sure of the exact year, but a nice early 50s or perhaps late 40s Studebaker pickup truck.

Being able to really work on cars, including car bodies, is one of those things I really wish I knew how to do with proficiency.

The Depressing Issue of the state bar journal and institutional blindness. Patch 'em up and send 'em back into battle.

 

Some time last week the most recent issue of the state bar journal arrived.

I always read it, although it doesn't always take me long to read it.  There's usually some interesting articles in any one issue.

I usually don't read it right away either, for whatever reason.  It's one of those magazines that hang around for a few days before I get to it, usually.  I sort of wish I hadn't read this issue at all.

The magazine is usually centered around a theme, and several articles will be on that month's them.  When this issue came the cover asked if you "Can imagine a world without lawyers?"

Now, first of all I'll note that I don't like articles that take that theme as a rule, and I've seen more than one. Usually articles like that by any one person in a field they're writing about approach some state of hagiography (this one included).  And it's really a straw man argument in the first place in regards to lawyers. There's no earthly way you have a world without lawyers as every society has some sort of role that is equivalent to lawyers even if they're not called lawyers, and in the modern world they're normally called lawyers.  The Soviet Union had lawyers, for instance, and its not exactly a society that we imagine had a lot of really independent court action.  So you really can't imagine a society without lawyers as society by definition has lawyers.

Shoot, even if you've played Monopoly or something like it as a kid, somebody was some kind of lawyer. ..  the one who knew the rules.

Additionally, the article was written by the prior law school dean, whom I'm a little miffed at.  That dean ended up in a spat with the then president of the university as the president of the university took the position that UW should have a special legal focus on law in the energy sector.  In looking at things that way he was not proposing "no more tort law" or something but he was alive to the fact that smaller land grant schools, and we are one, need to be pretty concentrated on what the heck we're doing or we loose out to bigger universities.  What's special about the UW law school, in other words, that will attract people to it?  He had a concept.  There needs to be one for the academic departments of smaller land grant schools in an era when there's not exactly a shortage of universities and colleges.

This is particularly true of law schools, I'd note, as they're in real trouble (and there's a rosy article on that in this issue, more on that later) and need to have a reason to exist. Since the state boarded the barque across the River Styx by adopting the Universal Bar Exam there's nearly no reason to even have a law school in Wyoming anymore, and the president was giving it a survivable focus, maybe. The the then dean opposed it, and the students, naive to what the UBE means for them in the state, backed the Dean.  It was short sighted.

Anyhow, seeing the cover title,I figured that was what the theme of the issue was.  It clearly wasn't, however.  I'm not sure what the them was, but if there was one, it would seem to be that "things are bad for lawyers."

One article in the magazine was by a lawyer I well know, as we share a common set of relatives. We're not directly related ourselves, but we share so many cousins we might as well be.  I have a set of near relatives in town that fit that definition and if we're not quite family we're something other than simple acquaintances or friends in the conventional sense.  That article was disheartening as it dealt with her adopted daughters struggle with addiction and depression, which caught me by surprise.  I should have known that, but I didn't.  In mentioning it to my son, who was only a year or so behind that individual in high school, he was aware of it and was surprised I wasn't, which is good I suppose.  The article closed with advice to young lawyers to "love deeply", to grow from pain, and not to judge.  The advice to all lawyers was to support other lawyers who need help and to cherish our clients. All good advice, in context, I suppose.

As an aside, I'll note that the article reported that her daughters descent into depression was brought about by marijuana.  I'm not surprised by this, but I am tired of the repeated articles I see by weed fans that there's no risk to it at all.  Baloney.  It's dangerous, and can be very dangerous.

Going back towards the front of the magazine there was an article by the State Bar Counsel, who has an article in every issue. This one, however, was deeply personal and detailed that our bar counsel, who had a very long career prior to taking up that role as a practicing trial lawyer, had been back east at a conference on lawyer well being only to find out that a friend of his, a law school colleague who lived in that state and whom he was going to meet with, had killed himself just days prior to the conference.    Pretty shocking and very sad.

The article concluded with an admonition from that conference about how every lawyer needs to take a role in lawyer well being and to overcoming what the conference holder apparently asserted was denial of a problem.  The article closed with the request that we, i.e., the lawyers, get to work on this.

Well, I don't think lawyers deny there is a problem in the profession.  Indeed, I've heard some lawyers speak of it very, very openly.  But I don't think we're going to do a darned thing about it and I don't even think we can.  If reform is coming, we're not the ones who are going to do it, as it would require a massive reform of the very system itself.  We have no interest in that whatsoever and can't imagine any other system anyway.  It's not that individual lawyers don't have an interest in it, but the system that's eating practitioners alive right now developed over a long course of time and it isn't going away soon.

Indeed, it will take the passing of the entire Boomer generation of lawyers and the one or two that came after them to make it pass and even then that's doubtful  The Boomer generation famously rejected materialistic pursuits, or so they claimed, in the 1960s but they took up the banner of materialism ferociously in the 1970s and have never let go.  It's that spirit that dominates the profession and that's not going to change.  The discussion isn't even about attempting to change it.  All of the discussion about the profession is instead about patching up the wounded to send them back in the battle for the bucks.

Wounded in New Guinea, World War Two.  This soldier likely didn't go home, he likely recovered and went into combat.  Whatever psychological wounds he had he likely carried for the rest of his life.

Its not just the conversion of the legal field from a profession into a materialistic pursuit that created this problem and I don't want to suggest it is, solely. That made it worse.  The very nature of American jurisprudence is very high stress and that leads to the problem of stress induced collapse of all type.  That's my point here.  State Bar programs tend to be addressed towards treating the symptoms and, when the suffering individual is sufficiently able, to send the sufferer back out into practice.  I've never seen any suggestion in any of these articles that the root cause of the problem should in any way be amended.  That is, the articles often note that being a lawyer is "high stress" but I've never seen any article, ever, ponder why the profession of law became so high stress.  Never.

Indeed every single program state bars or big bar organizations have to address what they all now acknowledge is a crisis in the field works this way.  On the occasions in which they run stories about program successes that feature testimonials they tend to be from brave lawyers who are willing to admit that they went through such a problem and went back into practice.  The only other articles we tend to see are the ones from lawyers who flamed out and met with a bad end.  We rarely see American articles from lawyers who crashed and recovered by getting their discharge from the field of combat, although I have read just such an article from a Canadian lawyer who ended up disbarred (or maybe suspended), lost his family, etc., etc., but was actually happy that his career had been terminated.

More often than that, we just deny that anything is going on, which is why nothing will change.  We accept the conditions, whether we should or not, and therefore ought to be pondering what we can do to arm people against them, rather than bemoaning the losses and suggesting that patching the victims up is the solution.

 King David of Scotland knighting a squire. This is, in a way, the way most law careers start out, in the minds of the newly minted lawyers, and in the myth of the law.  But in reality a lot of knights ended up dead, and some went rogue.  If we believe that men in the Middle Ages were like men now, no doubt some lived in horror of what they'd seen and probably some were glad when the Welsh archers found their personal mark.

A strong aspect of this is that we have an adversarial system of justice.  Only nations that have justice systems that descend from English Common Law have this system, and most haven't' taken it anywhere near as  far as we have.  The Common Law trial system itself, as I've noted before, was a substitute for trial by combat and lawyers are substitutes, in that system for Champions, who were (let's admit it) mercenaries.  I'm not criticizing lawyers today when I say that our trial system is a species of combat and lawyers are mercenaries in those battles.  That's the truth of it.  Another truth of that is, however, that being a mercenary takes a toll on the mercenary.  People admire mercenaries only if they're Soldier of Fortune fanboys or the viewers of odd movies, like The Wild Geese or The Dogs of War.  In reality, few people are really thrilled if a mercenary sits down to eat lunch with them.  Same thing is true of lawyers. And fighting for money is corrosive on your personality no matter who you are. There are lawyers who are saints, to be sure, but there are a lot more than are pretty dedicated sinners.  No wonder addiction to drugs, alcohol, gambling, pornography and vice of all types is so strong in the legal field.

 

Mercenaries in the Congo, with rebel troops, 1960s.  Lawyers have more in common with these guys than we'd care to admit and in more ways than one.

And just as patching up a mercenary and sending him back into battle is perfectly possible, just doing that really doesn't address the bigger problem and there's no way within the field to do it.  What are we going to do, as lawyers? Say, geez, this system that we've told the public is the greatest legal system on Earth really isn't?  We're not going to do that.  Most of us don't even know that this isn't the only really functional legal system and would be amazed that most Western nations don't use anything like it and yet have fair legal systems.

There are other advanced legal systems which are fair, just and not adversarial in the same fashion.  We don't know much about them and we aren't going to do anything, myself included, to suggest that adopting them or elements of them would be a good idea.  Nobody is going to stand up, for example, in the next Iowa state legislature and suggest that Iowa model its trial procedure on that of France.  Nope.  Not going to happen.

Not that I won't pitch a few ideas, mind you.

The article by the State Bar President in this issue came about due to an ostensible conversation with his young son, in which that child asked his parent what sort of law he did.  That article starts off with a joke from the President reminding the child that the family needed more doctors, but not lawyers.  I've now heard that joke too many times for me to take it as a joke and I think it reflects conversations that really take place in many households.  Indeed, one lawyer I know with young children keeps a list of other careers taped to his refrigerator for his children to view.  That taps back into another aspect of this, which is the now tired idea that we must make absolutely sure that our children are doctors or lawyers.

Indeed, I know plenty of lawyers who think just this way. "Be a doctor", the advice consistently is. Funny thing is that I hear a lot of doctors complain that their profession ain't what it used to be either, and I believe it.  If there's any profession that has been taken over more by the Siren Call of Money than the law, and I doubt there is, it would probably be the medical field. Be a doctor and make a lot of money is the common theme there.

Of course just saying this makes me sound like some sort of raging radical who would have been in the Petrograd Delusional Club in 1917, which I would not be.   I am in, I suppose the Chestertonian-Beloocian Public House Meeting Society by default.  And in that, I think the evolution of the modern economy as done a huge disservice to mankind.  I'm not in the camp that would urge any child not to attend university as its clear the modern economy has evolved to where that's a practical necessity unless you are the benefactor of a being in a family that's retained some sort of business you can run without doing that, and even then I'd still counsel you to go.  It's unfortunately, to say the least, as we've developed a whole range of jobs, which if statistics are correct, most people actually dislike.  As we've said here before, 70% of Americans dislike their jobs.  Pretty shocking.

In other words, Mike Rowe has a point, but it's a point that most people don't listen to for societal reasons.

Don Quixote, knight errant, which has some analogies to the topic being discussed here today.

Which doesn't equate, I'd note, with what the bar magazine is discussing.  The articles aren't speaking about lawyer satisfaction rates, they're writing about the practice of law eating lawyers alive and urging a Quixotic effort to take that on which we aren't going to do.  Indeed, we frankly aren't even going to look at the things we could do, even those things that wouldn't require a massive overhaul of the justice system itself. Patch 'em up and send them back in. . . everything will be fine.

Indeed, we aren't going to do the one thing that would be really easy to do, which would be to limit entry into the field and attempt to make sure that those entering it know what they are getting into and appear to be psychologically and temperamentally prepared to take what is coming their way.  We don't do anything of that type whatsoever..  We should, but we're not going to. Which takes me to the comments published by the current law school dean in this issue. The dean relates how applications for entry to law schools across the nation have declined over the past few years (which is supposed to be bad) although their up a bit now, but that this is a really good time for people to apply to law school, he says, as it should be easier to get in than ever.

A fine example of how law schools are making the practice of law worse.

This isn't the only way they're doing that, I'll note.  Law school support for the Uniform Bar Exam is widespread and that's massively detrimental to actual practitioners, which most law school graduates ultimately become.  Both stem from the systemic philosophical failure of modern law schools which is the logic that; 1) we need to stay in business no matter what; which means 2) we need to keep churning out graduates at the same rate and; 3) they need to be admitted to some bar no matter how ill prepared, in every since, they are to practice real law.

 Tire production line. . . pretty much the same way law schools view their students.  Not enough demand. . . well somebody needs to buy more cars. . . .

It's a disservice to their students and a disservice to the profession.

And it need not be so.

When I was in basic training at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, Sgt. Ronald E. Adams, one of our drill sergeants, informed us that he intended to break us down, if at all possible, both physically and psychologically.  He intended to do this, he declared, not because we were bad people if we failed, indeed he said quite the opposite, but rather because if we were going to fail, he'd rather it happen at Ft. Sill in basic training than in combat where other people could be killed when we broke down.  That logic should apply to law school.

It did basically apply to my undergraduate field of geology. 

 

Optical mineralogy lab at the University of Wyoming, circa 1986.  This was the last lab in this major a lot of students in the field would ever take, and not for a cheerful reason.

When I was a geology student at the University of Wyoming we were required to take Optical Mineralogy which was, we knew, a "weed out" class.  It was required for the major and you could only take it twice.  If you didn't get by the class with a grade of D, you were out of the program and could never get a degree with a geology major.  On the first day of class, the professor, Dr. Meyers, asked how many students were taking the class for the second time. A smattering of hands went up, including a couple of hands from graduate students that hadn't had to take Optical Mineralogy in their undergraduate programs from elsewhere (almost no graduate student in the geology department was from UW as UW didn't favor admitting its own students into the graduate program).  Dr. Meyers then noted that these were the people we had to watch as "we fail half this class".

That statement wasn't a joke. The grade in the class was curved and 50% of the class was made to fail no matter how good their grades were.  So grades of C and the like on tests were basically failing grades and even grades that were normally in the B range were barely in the D range.  The grade scale was designed to wipe out half of the enrollment in the class, more or less, considering that quite a few of the people who failed would just give up and not attempt a second chance (grad students had little choice but to attempt it).  Yes, I passed the class.

That wasn't the only geology department class that was a "weed out" class, however.  We had electives in the program we could take, but no matter what we took, at least one additional class would be a tough weed out class.  In my case, it was Invertebrate Paleontology, which I liked a great deal but which had a lab that was a nightmare.  Others took similar classes.  The point was that the geology department wanted to make sure that the students who came through the program stood up to academic rigor before they went out in the field or on to graduate school.

Law schools do nothing like that.

Contrary to what people tend to think, the hardest thing about modern law school has just been getting in, and even that isn't that hard.  The hurdle of getting over the baby steps of the LSAT are regarded as horrors by most law students who have never been through a more rigorous program.  Taking the LSAT twice in order to improve a score is very common when it should be the rule that you get one shot and one shot only.  The LSAT only tests logical thought, that's it, and if you have to actually study for that, you have no business in law school.

For that matter, law schools are a shadow of what they once were in terms of academic rigor and that's been followed up on as state after state has reduced the rigor of their bar exam with many now doing what Wyoming has done and having adopted the Uniform Bar Exam with no state test.

The concept that law school is really tough is common, but it's a breeze.  It can be really interesting, as the law can be really interesting, but  it is not hard, and its less tough now than ever.  At one time students had to worry about the long walk in law schools.  Not much anymore.

The long walk is something that also had an analogy to basic training and the geology department.  They had their own long walks.  In basic training, the long walk was an actual long walk.  When I went through basic training we had three long marches.  The first one was about seven miles, not bad. The next one after that was around fifteen, which is quite a hike with full pack and rifle. But the last one was thirty, which is a really grueling long march.  It started off early in the morning, like about 3:00 a.m., and ended up around 17:00 or so.  If you fell out of the march, you were done for good, discharged or recycled to a basic training unit that hadn't gotten to that step yet.  The concept was to see if you were physically able to endure the physical punishment of being a soldier.

In the geology department the same treatment was meeting out during Summer Field Class.  In that class we worked outdoors on various projects every day, making maps at night.  Part of the class involved following around Dr. Boyd, the same professor who taught paleontology, as he walked at high speed.  He was not a young man at the time, in his seventies if I recall correctly, but he could walk people in their twenties into the ground.  You didn't dare not keep up with him, let along because you needed to be wherever he was when he stopped to lecture.  A certain walk up a hill in the class was legendary and had acquired the nickname, in years prior to when I took it, of "the Bataan Death March", recalling that horrible event from World War Two.  While much of that was simply because Dr. Boyd was incredibly spry for a man of his (or younger) age, it was also to make the point that geology was an outdoor profession and you had to be able to endure the outdoors in order to work in it.

Law school, as noted, has nothing like this.  It should. And at one time, as also noted, it sort of did.

Law school is taught by the Socratic method, which basically means that its taught by debate. AT least it was when I was in law school, but I'm told now that this is increasingly rare and often professors just lecture, which would be incredibly dull.  At one time, students who were not prepared to engage in a debate with a professor were made to march out of the classroom, which was universally regarded as embarrassing.  By the time I was in law school, however, this was extremely rare, although I can recall it occurring at least once.

When I was in law school, however, it was still the case that a student had to be prepared to debate a professor and defined his own views of a case.  And there was sort of a weed out class in the form of some required classes that students took their first year in law school.  Only one of those classes, Contracts, was really hard, but that was only partially be design. The other reason was that the professor was awful.  At any rate, I'm told that today, the lecture style is just that, a lecture.

How boring. . .and ineffective in more than one way.

Okay, so what am I getting at?

We're starting to see a lot of articles about how the problems some lawyers develop later in practice can be traced all the way back to law school.  If law schools exist to train lawyers and prepare them to practice law, they ought to also exist to keep those who should note be doing that from doing it.  But instead they pitch to prospective students with absurd "you can do anything with a law degree arguments, allow a testing entry procedure in which applicants can defeat the test which they take to gain entry by taking it multiple times, encourage applications when they know that the number of jobs are down, and encourage the dilution of bar admission standards by arguing for the UBE.  In short, law schools are graduating students who have no business being lawyers, temperamentally, and they really don't care.

Law schools are not going to self reform any more than lawyers are going to demand a reform to the system of law we are trained in and work in.  If anyone could do this, it would have to be state bars, but they are headed in the opposite direction, drinking the Koolaide of  UBE.  If state bar entrance committees got a clue (not likely) and wanted to act on this problem, they could.

They could do that by requiring, first of all, that only graduates of ABA accredited law schools could apply for admission to the bar of their state, something our bar already does. But beyond that they could have real state specific bar exams that were rigorous and on the law of their states. There's no reason whatsoever that the passage of those exams should be much above 50% and there's no reason that an applicant should get to take it more than twice. . . ever.  And there's no reason to have reciprocity with other states.  That would reduce the number of lawyers to be sure, but (and we'll get to that) that would be a good thing.

That would basically reverse things to the way they were as recently as ten or fifteen years ago in most states, but going beyond that an applicant should have an undergraduate degree in some real academic field and something like "general pre law" or some undergraduate degree with "law" in the title doesn't cut it. Those degrees serve only to get a person into law school and are otherwise fairly worthless if the student fails to gain admission or later seeks to get out of law or must get out.

Likewise, the flood of bogus degrees with no application, including anything that has "[fill in blank here] Studies] is not useful.  How to sort these out is would be chore but a group of smart people like lawyers (assuming that's still the case, and given the flood of applicants and ease of application over the past couple of decades that is not necessarily true) ought to be able to figure that out.  Science degrees, engineering degrees, the classic liberal arts (history, English) etc. would count.  Weight out to be given in application to the hardest undergraduate degrees, say a 10% boost by implication in your LSAT scores.

And, and here's a real kicker, at least 10% of the faculty of any law school from which a student seeks admission from should have practiced law within the past five years.  Law schools tend to be a refuge from the practice of law and are packed with people who don't really know what practicing law is like.  Law school professors should be licensed in the state in which they're teaching, under the criteria noted above.

Finally, in my view, a lot of law schools can just go if they are just churning out graduates. For state land grant colleges like our own, if they aren't serving a need for the state, they can go. And I'm saying that about a school I graduated from.  I'm not saying it isn't serving the needs of the state, but right now I have very real doubts about it.

Would that cure the Lawyer Blues problem?  Probably not entirely.  But a much more rigorous academic program, more difficulty in getting in, and more difficulty getting admitted, would serve a lot of the same purpose that basic training does in the military.  It's a lot better to have students weeded out or broken down while they're at Square State College than it is to admit them and have them melt down while representing clients.  And I've seen that.

Will this occur.  No.  I wouldn't be surprised at this point to see a law school dean argue for admission for everyone who graduates from "Ol Big Square", along with a state provided comfort cat and a box of Twinkies to go with it.

And so, while I"m using on the problem, what else could we realistically do, but we're not?  That is, if we, the lawyers, are watching this train wreck, and we're urged by our state bar to do something, what else could we do, assuming that we're not going to argue for a change in the system of law itself, which we are not going to do (indeed, we're going to do nothing at all, but that's somewhat besides the hypothetical point).

One thing we could also do is require a readmission to the bar at some point.

Now, I'm not suggesting that lawyers retake the exam after a period of time, or at least not the full exam. But I am suggesting that perhaps after a decade or so, and then repeating every decade after that, something be done.  Perhaps a lawyer should have to honestly readmit and with certain representations.  Has he suffered a bar discipline and why?  Has he been having medical or psychological, or legal, troubles?  Is he/she actually practicing law?

Truck drivers and pilots have to have medical certificates to do their jobs.  What about lawyers?  That might be a good idea as well.

Policemen do with most agencies anymore, and they have to undergo, quite often a type of psychological examination.  I know, for instance, that applicants to be game wardens in Wyoming must sit through an interview with a psychologist.  If that's the case for game wardens, why isn't it for lawyers on a decadal basis.  Indeed, why isn't it at the point of admission.

Our state bar doesn't even have applicant interviews anymore, which used to be the final stage of admission.  But ti was deemed to serve no purpose and was long ago omitted. Omitted, I'll note, before the state specific test was omitted.  That probably ought to be brought back. And with it, why not require an interview with a psychologist?  If game wardens and policemen have to do it, why not lawyers?

Well, because we're a self policing bar, that's why, just like most others. And so we will not subject ourselves to that.

And indeed, over time, we've gone to a system that's basically designed to get people omitted, no matter what, after they've gone through a school training ground that's designed to churn them out and keep them in.

And then we wonder why things go wrong?

We recruit them to a field that's very high stress and a species of substituted combat based on lies that a person with a law degree is qualified to do something else, fail to test of their suitable, in any fashion, for the combat we're throwing them into, and fail to check up on them after they're engaged in it. When some fail, we patch them up and throw them back in. 

And we wonder why things go wrong?

Maybe, instead of congratulating ourselves on our wonderfulness on imagining how horrible the world would be without lawyers, we ought to wonder why we put so many of those wonderful lawyers into conditions that a lot of them, just as wonderful people, can't endure.

But we're not going to.

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Postscript

If all of this seems somewhat strident, and it likely does, let me note that if I had been at the same conference as our bar council and that question had been asked, I would have had to raise my hand.

That gives me a pretty strong set of opinions on this.

A few years ago I was handling the defense of a client in which the plaintiff was represented by a well known and highly respected plaintiff's attorney who was probably in his early 60s at the time.  I'd known of him, but hadn't met him, prior to that case.

I was surprised in the case by how disheveled he seemed to be.  I was also surprised that he wouldn't attend any of the out of state depositions, which isn't the norm for careful practitioners.  But beyond that it didn't seem to me that anything was really alarming about his behavior.  Then, one day, he called me up, after calling a lawyer who was handling the defense of another defendant in the action, and asked for the vacation of a set of dates.

I really debated granting the extension.  It seemed like an odd request and the case was heading relatively soon towards a set of motion hearings.  But usually we cooperate with each other on things like that, so I reluctantly agreed, although I felt really odd about it.

The next morning the other defense counsel texted me early in the morning. The plaintiff's lawyer had gone home that night and killed himself.  I didn't see it coming.

But maybe somebody could have.

And maybe he shouldn't have been in the profession, or have been allowed to stay in it.  Learning a little bit more about him after that, it seemed that it was well known that he was suffering from depression and he'd lived a truly tragic life.

Self policing bar indeed.

Today In Wyoming's History: October 29

Today In Wyoming's History: October 29:

Today is National Cat Day.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: St. George Greek Orthodox Church, Worland Wyoming

Churches of the West: St. George Greek Orthodox Church, Worland Wyoming:

This church was a bit of a surprise as I wasn't aware there was a Greek Orthodox Church in Worland.  I don't know anything else about it.  The structure is interesting as it's sort of a modified Prairie Gothic structure.

Today In Wyoming's History: October 29, 1917

Today In Wyoming's History: October 29:

1917  Record cold struck the West with Soda Butte Wyoming's temperature falling to to -33° F a U.S. record for October.  Lander's temperature fell to-14° F and Cheyenne's to 2° F.

The coming cold snap was noted by the Laramie Boomerang, which also featured war news that day and a rather dramatic cartoon about the Germans in Russia.

Chesterton on swimming upstream.

A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.

G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, 1925

Ahhhh!!!!!!!!!

Is there no end to this orange gourd madness?

The line from Kennedy to Trump. . and from democracy to the reeducation camp. Judicial blunderng and its impact.

 Soviet forced labor.  Thank goodness you can't get in trouble for just having views, even unexpressed ones, here. Right?

When the nation was leading up the United States Supreme Court's decision in Obergefell, and while the matter was still in the democratic arena here people had an opportunity to express their opinions, it was often stated that there was no kind of threat at all poised by a governmental declaration recognizing same sex marriage as all that meant is that people who held what was a minority view of the legitimacy of that being a recognizable institution would be able to obtain that status and nothing more.

That is, while it would mean that such couples were legally recognized as spouses, its proponents declared that would not require any private individual to violate their conscience, whether that conscience was formed by faith, tradition, or philosophy, but rather the legal status would be recognized.  Opponents of the movement, who were more successful than not in the democratic arena, who claimed that the backers of the movement would demand recognition from everyone, and then ultimately demand the destruction of marriage itself, were scoffed at as alarmists.

No matter what the truth, or inaccuracy, of that might have been in the legislative arena, we received instead the judicial jumping of the gun by Anthony Kennedy and his fellow travelers and we may now meet Col Leland B.H. Bohannon, United States Air Force.

Col. Bohannon was, until very recently the head of the Air Force Inspection Agency (I have no idea what that is) at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico.  He's now been relieved and his Air Force career is as good as over.  And the reason he was believed was for not signing a congratulations letter to the "spouse" of an NCO who was retiring.

Now, if that seems odd, we'll note that there's no official requirement in the Air Force that a commanding officer sign any such, well let's admit it, nice but namby pamby letter to the spouses of retiring NCOs nor should there be.  That would be dumb.  That's silly and the Air Force presumably has much more serious things to do.  Such a letter has just about as much meaning as the letter wishing you a happy birthday from your bank.  I don't even know why a commanding officer should have any particular knowledge about who is retiring and who isn't, and likely they often don't, but the service is fully of silly traditions that have little to do with anything.  This one, however, had a lot to do with political correctness and a movement to shut people up now that the Supreme Court has ruled.  

And that, dear reader, shows why the Supreme Court does the nation a huge disservice when it seeks to at as the Platonic Council of Elders than a court of law.  And its' not the only example.

But to complete this example, the NCO's "spouse" was the same gender as the NCO.  I.e., it was a same gender marriage, if you accept that marriage is defined by the United States Supreme Court, just like the origin of life is, rather than by nature or a natural law.  Lt. Col. Bohannon did not accept that as his conscience was formed by a religious faith that holds the opposite tenant.

I don't know what religious faith Bohannon holds, and its actually not important for this discussion. In order to hold this particular religious belief he could be a serious Protestant Christian of any number of denominations, or a Catholic, Orthodox, traditional Jew, or Muslim.  No idea.  He wouldn't have to have any faith at all to hold the same idea for philosophic reasons as many others have, including some notable European homosexuals who hold the same idea.  Indeed, it was the majority belief of most Americans up until the judicial coup that forced the law in the opposite direction just two years ago.

And Bohannon wasn't in anyone's face about it and his action was neither unthinking, nor would I regard it as particularly courageous.  When the matter came up he sought an exception under a new, and I'd hold absurd, Air Force PC system in which an officer who has serious religious objections can seek a regulatory exception to such an action (I'd hold if you have serious religious or philosophic objections the law should just presume your action is okay). This meant submitting his petition to the local Chaplin's office and the local JAG, both of whom apparently wimped out and returned the petition with no action even though the regulation doesn't provide for no action.  Faced with the wimpy noodle response of the Chaplin's office and the JAG office he chose to forgo signing and a junior officer did.

And then the offended NCO filed a complaint that he/she was discriminated against and the Colonel was relieved.  

A legal action has been filed.

No matter what the result is, I'd wager this officer is done for, even though he was apparently on the verge of being promoted to Brigadier General.

Now, this is a lesson in a simple fact.  When the United States Supreme Court confuses its role in a controversial matter with being the Oracles Of Black Robed Wisdom, rather than a court of law, they make matters infinitely worse. What occurs is that the parties holding a controversial view that they cannot convince the majority of latch on to the decision, no matter what they said they'd do before and scream that the matter is decided and anyone who disagrees with them is a bigot.  That's now exactly what's happening all over.  If you read the Stars and Stripes article on this the commenters won't let any air into the conversation at all "he's a bigot!" is their scream.

Well, that view doesn't make him bigoted at all.  And the Supreme Court having decided the issue doesn't really decide it in the larger sense.  People who thought it wold had to be complete and totally deluded.  Indeed, I noted two years ago when the legal train wreck of Obergefell was decided that:

The common wisdom right now is that the public will now accept this, where it hadn't.  I doubt it will, and already those who appeared defeated are beginning to resist and rally, with proposals that will have to be taken seriously in short order.  A real reaction is likely to be a massive level of contempt for a Court which was already not particularly well liked by much of the nation, and which now shows itself capable of acting in a Napoleonic fashion.  Like the little emperor, who marched on Europe in the name of liberal ideals, liberty, quality and fraternity, five robed emperors, likewise sitting for life, have decreed that legislatures don't matter in something in which they very much do. And, just like the little emperor, these emperors amazingly do so in interrupting what was seemingly a trend in the same direction they went anyhow.  They clearly need not have done it under the law, and even if they felt their decision to be a socially correct one, they could have waited for it to unfold.  A person doesn't need to be hasty in overturning a norm that's as old as human history.

But what it has done is to really help split the country.  Prior to the decision this was in the legislatures and we had a majority in Congress that did not support it and a President that said he didn't.  When the Court decided the matter the President lit up the White House in the colors of the controversial movement and the Democrats overnight were all for it.  A little over a year later the nation elected a populist President further to the right than the GOP by quite some margin who held a lot of views on all sorts of things in open contempt.  Anthony Kennedy to Donald Trump might not be a straight line, but it's a line, and a short one.

 This guy. . . . 

in no small part elected this one.

Which brings us to abortion.

Eh?

It does.  Earlier on Obergefell I've repeatedly cited to the Court's old decision in Roe v. Wade as an example of judicial blundering.  It is, and a lesson should be learned. The Roe decision is incredibly stupid and it was at the time. The entire concept that nine lawyers can decide when life begins is blisteringly arrogant.  It held philosophy and tradition in contempt. And it also held scientific progress in contempt.

Over time, that became apparent to more and more people  that the latter proposition was absurd. And indeed, we've bizarrely been advancing rapidly toward the point at which babies who can be legally aborted will also be viable, with huge medical assistance, outside the womb.  Because of medical advances the "trimester" legal system that the Supreme Court devised is now scientifically absurd and nobody really tries to defend it.  The debate, therefore, has reduced on the pro decision side to mostly yelling at the opponents and all pretenses to maintaining a rational debate are gone as there's no rational debate to be had. The clear path is that over time the original scientific argument, human life must begin at conception, is pretty clearly correct.

As with the debate, and yes there is one, on same gender marriage, those with traditional religious views have been in the forefront of those who have refused to accept the decision.  Missed in all of this is that religious and philosophy are very closely linked and if properly understood continues of the same basic discipline. They seek to understand the nature of things by the obvious physical nature.  That there is a nature of things beyond the mere physical nature is accepted by all peoples of all types everywhere, even if they don't agree on what it is. This has played an interesting and missed part of the abortion debate and will play an increasing one in the debate on same gender marriage. I.e., what are we and what does that mean?

The what are we and what does that mean question lead an increasing number of fairly secular people to reject abortion and that's lead to the overall view that its generally wrong.  In spite of that, the proponents of that, mostly in the 1970s left, scream as if everyone who is opposed to it is a religious fanatic, which in their view would generally be anyone with any religion at all.  In reality, however, a large number of the people who've come to be opposed to it are not in that category at all and during the last two decades to quite well known atheists were amongst those who flat out regarded is as wrong.  That's pretty telling. I suspect that the same curve will occur here as this gets debated as at the end of the day basic biology makes the concept of same sex permanent unions rather strained and the concept that the state must create a fiction that they're identical to mixed gender permanent unions cannot be really supported without a whole pile of footnotes that require all sorts of other actions in order to attempt approaching that being true.

Indeed, because that is true, the judicial decision doesn't support the basic facts, its is guaranteed that the only way that the court's decisions can be upheld, in both instances, is by forcing an entire pile of additional actions against people's basic beliefs and desires.  Every such action makes the original decision all the more strained and disliked and makes the original pronouncement all the more a lie.  It's already clear that Anthony Kennedy's absurd position that this wouldn't impact people who disagreed with it all is a colossal whopper.  The Court will be hearing a decision this term where a Colorado Commission, which for all the world is bizarrely reminiscent of bodies that existed in Communist states, told a baker, of all things, who he must bake for.  That's just flat out absurd, but that's going to be heard by the court.

Equally absurd is a military where an officer who was informed by his faith reached a difficult decision, after trying to get help from the military through official processes, on whether or not his signature on a card ratified the truth of the essence of a same gender marriage, something that he does not personally believe in.  It has nothing to do with aircraft or missiles and yet he's lost his position because he does not hold what many to be hold, but Anthony Kennedy holds, to be true.  His action didn't impact anything official at all.  Basically, he's been told that he can't hold his personal religious beliefs.  For those who simply disagree with Obergefell for reasons of biology or philosophy there's not even a theoretical out, as there at least was for those who could base their actions, or maybe not, on a religious basis.

But then, the nation  has been struggling for over forty years with a legal decision that was scientifically bankrupt and which has long ago quite being taken seriously as a matter of informed law.

All of which shows how different these cases are from true civil rights cases, such as Brown v. Board of Education, in spite of claims to the opposite. It is not that Brown was immediately accepted, quite the opposite, but it was supported by nature.  It came to be accepted by the population as nature always wins.  Race based prejudice, while apparently something of a human instinct, is always ultimately unnatural and that was always the flaw in American racism.  All the court really did, in a case like Brown or Loving v. Virginia is get around to noticing what people already had.

Likewise, the same is true of Supreme Court cases that created a true right of privacy, even though that's been misunderstood.  It isn't that people actually ratify every act that takes place behind closed doors, its rather that they just know that people are flawed in all sorts of degrees and we ought not to really bother with policing stuff that isn't really more widely harmful.  In regards to homosexuality most people, long ago, accepted that they'd accept private behavior, but that doesn't mean that have ever held that all sexual behavior comports with the ordered natural one.  And that's why the real impact of Obergefell will be similar to Roe's, decades of animosity and hostile debate and legal actions. And all because the Supreme Court just can't stand to let trends of that type develop where they will and instead it wants to be hip and cool.

The ultimate tragedy of all of this, or at least one of them, is that by taking that action the Supreme Court not only teed up a system that now acts as an agency of repression for people who hold the traditional view, but that it also seems to have been the straw that broke the American political camel's back.  For decades both political parties have managed to avoid taking actions on really hard decisions in areas that amount to philosophical matters.  Republicans claimed to be opponents of abortion but they haven't managed to do much about it at a national level since 1973, leaving the matter to be fought out at the state level in bills that are always around the margins.  Congress steadfastly adhered, in both parities, at a national level to the traditional view of marriage up until the Obergefell decision at which time the Democrats, true to their traditional form, leaped upon the caboose of the departed train and claimed the issue as their own while the GOP, true to its traditional form, claimed to be opposed to the decision but set itself into its traditional seat of unofficial lethargy.  Likewise, on immigration, which is now constantly in the Courts and which also involves deep philosophical world views, both parties have pretty much sat around doing nothing.

But there was something about Obergefell, ;perhaps because it  runs so contrary to what most people have held to be true about sex, let alone marriage, and in an area where most people are perfectly capable of grasping the philosophical nature of the debate by simple personal observation, that really fed into a deep disgust with the status quo that's been simmering at least since 1968.  Obergefell may very well have broken the American political dynamic and what the Court's do with the followup may make it increasingly worse.  It may very well be the case that an actual third party with enough support to gain actual seats in legislative bodies will come about and it will take millions from both parties if it does.  

All of which makes Justice Kennedy's befuddlement about how people reacted to Obergefell demonstrate just how out of touch the old man really is.  In private statements, he expressed wounded dismay that people disliked the decision and thought it would be like his decision on flag burning, which he believes everyone likes but which, in reality, is largely forgotten.  This won't be forgotten as his gutting of the legislative process and its impacts will be ripping us apart for years. 

__________________________________________________________________________________

Postscript.

 You can't think that.

It's worth remembering that amongst the worse things this country has ever done have been periods in which the government's official position on one thing or anther was "dissenter, just shut up".

Whether you agree with the dissent or not (and I can think of periods of history in which I'd be on either side of the fence on various matters that the government was shutting people up about), shutting people up is universally anti democratic and bad.

The Alien and Sedition Acts, which sought to shut people up during John Adams presidency are looked back upon as a real black mark on the country's early history.  Almost from the onset of World War One the government was seeking to shut up all sorts of people, even Congressmen to a degree, who didn't think World War One was nifty and then it went right on to shut people up who were Communist or near Communist after the war.  I'm not keen on Communism but saying "you can't say that" was flat out wrong and is now regarded as both wrong and childish.

These acts, I'd note, occurred during a Progressive  Administration. So liberals, contrary to what they'll claim, certainly aren't above ordering people to just shut the heck up.

And the entire Red Scare of the 1950s is dimly remembered by most, if in accurately remembered. To the extent that Congress was seeking to ferret out Communist in the government who were acting as Soviet spies, I think they were right.  But it went beyond that and they went after Communist in average life, which wasn't a crime.  If a film maker was a Communist, well, that was his right. Saying, "you can't think that" was wrong.

I note this, as it would appear that we're in one of those eras once again, and that's extremely troubling.  The point at which one side in a debate says "you can't say that, you can't think that" and has the backing of the government. . . . well, that's McCarthyism as people imagine it to have been.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

Poster Saturday: I'll be with you, boys.