Law songs

"La-la-la-laaa-la
Shoulda been a lawyer
I'd get to argue every day
Getting buckets full of money
Keepin' Lindsay out of jail."

I have a bit of a hate-on for lawyers right now.  Nothing personal, of course...  my BFF is in fact, a lawyer, but rather my ill will is directed towards the job and possibly law in general. Of course we all know there are good lawyers; honest, honorable men and women that fight for social justice.  But then there are the others... the ones that every good lawyer joke is based on.  The fact we allow those lawyers to so distort and manipulate the law in the quest to win (and we all know how the bottom line loves a winner), is pathetic to say the least.  The reason I struggle so much with this is because of the abhorrent nature of our overly litigious system of justice here in Canada, and even more so in the US.

We have considerable problems with the legal system and listing them all would take days.  Unfortunately, when these problems are so profound that the criminals that are caught are having to be let free (on account of the timing out of the statute of limitations before they could get to trial), then we've really in trouble. (This recently happened in Canada with a notorious group of Hell's Angels) The courts are so backlogged they're becoming totally ineffective.   And why are they so backlogged, you ask?  Well, that's because everybody and their brother is suing each other for all manner of transgressions, real or imagined.  And why is that happening?  Because the fine folks of the USofA, and by extension Canada, have seen this as a credible way to make money... BIG money.  It's replaced the low probability lottery ticket as the future retirement fund of choice. Why work when you could pull in a six figure settlement by just breaking a couple of bones and whining real loud?  There are constant ads on television encouraging this kind of behaviour.  People are scraping the bottom of the pot in an effort to find some reason they could sue some big corporate entity and walk away rich.  With law firms vying for clients, they'll make anything into a lawsuit while their 'poor victims' sit back and plan how to spend their potential windfall.  I'm heavily generalizing here, but you get the point.  It's when you have piles of these types of time sucking-cases in your court room, that the legitimate ones often get lost in the shuffle.

But this is not the only problem with the system. Far from it. The amount of money that is spent every year on convicting and housing thousands of men and women who have committed minor crimes is astounding.  For example: the US in particular just loves to send people to jail for having a spliff in their pockets.  Think about how many of these 'criminals' there must be serving time for their crime. Yes, it happens here too, but our pot laws are a little less stringent.  The fact that these are traditionally poor men and women only acerbates the tragedy of it all. They don't have the money for the team of crack lawyers in Versace suits.  No, the injustice of the protection of ones rights under the law being granted to the highest bidder makes me cringe.  Yet what can we do?  Lobby our MP's? Law by tradition has a symbiotic relationship with politics, so trying to get things done by going down that road feels equally futile.  It's a conundrum.  The whole thing is a holy hot mess.

So, we see the problem, but not the solution. Seems to be a theme nowadays.

NB: I should mention that the fact I used the name 'Lindsay' and the word 'jail' in my little song and posted it on the web, will provide just enough ammunition for Ms. Lohan to file a lawsuit against me...

Well, she's gonna have to find me first.