True

“Virtues don't excuse sins; they cohabit with them.”

Ta-Nahesi Coates, the Atlantic, "Hitchens And The War"

Quote of the Day

An “unbiased source” is a source we don’t understand well enough to perceive its bias.

Commenter "Anderson" at "Lawyers, Guns and Money" blog.

Avoiding that enemy

My Networkers colleague, Mr. John Simpson of the Sutton Group, has a "Preferred Client Update" which he regularly sends to current and former customers, professional colleagues and others. I don't have time for most such pamphlets but I always make the time for John's because it almost always has something worth knowing about homes, housing and odd-and-ends. A recent one is no exception, having this excellent quote from Sophocles:

"No enemy is worse than bad advice."

It struck me that in a profession such as mine or John's, 99% of what we do boils down to making sure that we are the client's ally, the one who makes sure that they get good advice and looking to ensure that the enemy of bad of advice is kept away from their gates. If you take it seriously like John and I do your clients do well.

There oughta be a law?

"People want to think that there's always legal accountability where there should be moral accountability. But in the criminal context, you should always err against overextending the law."

Alan Dershowitz
Harvard law professor, in Slate magazine.

What's a Lawyer's Job?

"The lawyer's job in practice is to be on one hand the impassioned representative of his client to the world, and on the other the wise representative to his client of the legal system and the society, explaining and upholding the demands and restrictions that system places on them both."

Scott Turow

I feel the same way

"I believe in coincidences. Coincidences happen every day. But I don't trust coincidences."

James Crocker

Noise?

A client of mine and I were discussing various options for a new corporation, resulting in the following exchange.

Me: "Have you considered bringing on other investors as silent partners?"
Client: "Yes, but I'm not going to do that. They could handle the investment part, but they're no good at silent."

[Quoted with the kind permission of the client.]

Some thoughts on things creeping north 2

"The Real Interrobang", a London blogger, has a keen eye for apt quotes. As you will recall a quoted comment on American policing prompted a blog post here last week. I stumbled across another today which continued that "I'm glad our police aren't like that! thought:

In my experience, serious commercial plane crashes are generally the result of a chain of very minor factors that align sufficiently to result in an accident. The apologies an compensation for the victims is certainly the decent thing to do, but the more telling difference here is that there is an enormous effort made by the airline, manufacturers and government to determine what caused the crash, and (often very expensive) remedial steps to prevent that problem from ever happening again. If police departments took this approach whenever they screw up and cause injury or death to innocent people, I would find it a lot easier to cut them some slack. I'm thinking that a good analogy here is the difference between private and commercial aviation. The accident rates for commercial carriers are so low that they are almost statistically insignificant, and are still trending down. The accident rates for general aviation (that is, amateur pilots like me) have been pretty static for many years. The sad thing is that the private pilots still regularly kill themselves because of rookie mistakes like failing to properly preflight an aircraft, or stalling and spinning from a low altitude. These would be analogous to the kinds of mistakes we're seeing the police make on these raids. In my opinion, law enforcement agencies in North America are still acting like amateurs despite the years of experience they should have amassed by now. If they took an approach that was more like commercial aviation, we would all be a lot safer, and probably more likely to trust police officers we interact with day to day.
"GXT, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, comments".

I honestly don't think that the "North American" descriptor is fair, simply because Canadian police forces are, in the main, still far superior to their American counterparts in their handling of the citizenry and in their respect for the law and proper process. No doubt my colleagues in the criminal bar might have some cutting things to say about some forces or invidudal police (and it is, for example, difficult to ignore the shocking institutional failings in the RCMP, problems which which seem to be ongoing) but the fact remains that we have a better chance of retaining excellent policing if we also note the many things they do right; I don't accept the notion that treating them as if they were indistinguishable from their oft deeply troubling and increasingly authoritarian American counterparts is at all productive or just.

True

In the long run, luck is given only to the efficient.

Helmuth von Moltke.(Molte the Elder is, in my opinion, one of the best sources of military quotes out there, probably because most of them can apply so effectively to day-to-day life.)

Some thoughts on things creeping north

I personally have a fairly high opinion of Canadian police in general. They are, taken as a breed, far more sensible, far less violent, far less paranoid and certainly far less hostile to the citizenry than their American counterparts who in many, many instances have spent the better part of the last three decades sliding downhill in their regard for the law or obedience to any limits on their authority.

I ponder this issue because when one looks south one sees the increasing use of the Taser to ensure "compliance". This is disturbingly often not about a response to someone genuinely resisting lawful arrest or being a threat to public or personal safety but more to do with not kowtowing rapidly or obsequiously enough to the officer's authority, whether or not the exercise of that authority is right or wrong, lawful or unlawful, rational or arbitrary. One commenter has noted,

I’m sure that [the Taser] makes the cops’ jobs easier and safer for themselves if they Tase more people instead of wrestling them to the ground; I don’t care. ... The police do not have a right to a completely submissive citizenry and they should be prevented from trying to create one.

-- Scarshapedstar, “Today in Tasering: And the Beat Goes On,” Correntewire, quoted at "You Still Can't Do That On Slashdot", "The Real Interrobang", August 11, 2008

That's the key, isn't it? A citizen should be compliant with the law, not necessarily with police authority. The latter is in service to the former, not synonymous with it and certainly not the determinant of it. Indeed, one of the hallmarks and safeguards of a truly free and just society is the ability of a citizen to stand up to an officer when the officer is wrong or breaking the law.

When officers feel that they have a right to Taser somebody who is problematic -- as in the Robert Dziekański case, where four trained, fit, young and armoured RCMP officers Tasered and killed one middle aged man -- as opposed to a genuine threat then we have a disturbing Americanization of our police methods of problem-solving. [Note: I'm forty-four and of about the same height, weight and build as Mr. Dziekański was. It will be a sad, sad day for policing when it takes more than one or two unarmed officers to subdue me or somebody like me, so much so that the use of four officers was ludicrous and the use of Tasers was monstrous.]

Police work is often dangerous, but so is giving men guns, Tasers and body armour and sending them out amongst their fellow citizens. The key to a democratic society is the balancing of our need for safety and policing with our need to be free citizens. For the most part we've balanced that in Canada, thanks in great deal to the good sense of the individual coppers involved. I'd hate to see that go. I like the Americans fine, but I don't want their society and I certainly don't want their policing problems and, frankly, I don't think that any sane person does.

Quite. So.

TD Bank CEO Ed Clark [made]the following comments ... at a TD Ameritrade management conference in Florida last week:

"It will astound you, but there's a group called the Canadian Council of Chief Executives and we had a meeting two weeks ago, and almost every single person said, 'Raise my taxes, get this deficit done.' "

Nothing warms the hearts of Canadians more than hearing the CEO of a major corporation, especially a bank, calling on the government, as if on behalf of all Canadians, to "raise my taxes."

"CEOs unite for GST hike", Terence Corcoran, Financial Post. Saturday, February 13, 2010

Why do we have law at all?

"Law is born from despair of human nature."

José Ortega y Gasset

A good writer ponders a bad jury

“In the McFarland case, the defendant set up a plea of insanity and succeeded in proving himself a fool. And he was acquitted by a jury of his peers.”

Ambrose Bierce,
in a comment on a San Francisco case.

An interesting thought on statutory limitation

I’ve often thought there out to be a quota on the size of a state’s entire statutory code. Something on the order of 10-20 million characters. This would include not only the laws, but any rule or regulation created by any state agency (often published in something called an Administrative Code).

Those laws and rules would only get to be so large, and then, before anything new was added, they’d have to get rid of something else. The legislature would also be responsible for figuring out each agency’s “budget”, that is, how many characters that agency could use for its rules.

If this were in effect, maybe they’d keep only what was really important.

Commenter "Ahcuah" at theagitator.com, an American libertarian website, January 2nd, 2010

Sanity on Social Policy

"I don't believe that suffering is morally edifying. I'm in favor of more happiness and less suffering wherever possible, which is apparently a radical position."

"KevinBaker", Shakesville, comments, h/t to "The Real Interrobang"

What is believed?

"People who would not believe a High Priest if he said the sky was blue, and was able to produce signed affidavits to this effect from his white-haired old mother and three Vestal Virgins, would trust just about anything whispered darkly behind their hand by a complete stranger in a pub."

Terry Pratchett, from the novel Maskerade.

The wisdom of crowds can be overrated.

"The IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters."

Terry Pratchett, from the novel Maskerade.

Thinking clearly on the accused

An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

Thomas Paine

The necessary virtue of proof-reading

I spoke earlier today with a networking colleague who drew my attention to a letter she had received from one of her suppliers, expressing pleasure that their firm was once again my colleague's choice for her "hoe based business".

That missing M makes a lot of difference, doesn't it? Double check your outgoing letters!

Precision often annoys people

Lawyers often get taken to task for our attention to detail and our precision with words. It's occasionally very vexing: nobody complains when a surgeon puts the knife in exactly the right spot, or feels hard done by when their contractor's woodwork meets just where it should. However, a lawyer often seems taken to task for getting our words Just So; it's seen as, well, sharp in the unpleasant sense of the word. You take the bad with the good in a job like this, but it's always a little comforting when somebody "gets it" so it was fun to come across this quote:

“It requires as much caution to tell the truth as to conceal it.”

Baltasar Gracian