Saturday 1 December 2012

paper chase or then ‘tis like the breath of an unfee’d lawyer

In Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part II, one of the henchmen of the pretender to the throne and usurper, Dick the Butcher, famously proposes, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
While maybe this seems in a modern context like an avenue to restore balance in an overly litigious society, it was meant rather as the most expedient route to counter counter-insurrectionists: regarded as the possibly the last and best defense against disorder and oppression, lawyers were regarded as unbiased keepers of justice and independent thought and a nuisance to revolutionaries.

Dick the Butcher, however, never met the courtly ranks of a secretive group of lobbying legal professionals called arbitrators. European Corporate Observatory presents an interesting and revealing treatment on the law firms and their retainers who pose exclusively to profit from injustice and pilot public policy in favour of private interests and enterprises. Though not precisely a new or isolated phenomena, the concerted efforts of these new ambulance-chasers are behind all the big headlines and points of contention, from energy companies’ prosecution of Germany for abandoning nuclear energy, the push for allowing G-M crops in Europe, aggravating independent research on the topic and science in general (at least in matters that might confound profits), labour equity and pensions—and all at the tax-payers’ expense since the unobliging defendant is the government. It seems that the interpretation of the butcher’s plan has become a backward-construction.  Be sure to check out more revealing stories at this watch-dog’s website.