Posts Tagged ‘Ralph Nader’

A University of Connecticut School of Law moot courtroom was a fitting setting last month, as consumer activist, politician and lawyer Ralph Nader sought to put the legal profession on trial.

Warrantless eavesdropping, the war in Iraq, corporate wrongdoing — Nader is a man with quite a few bones to pick. But his chief complaint was that America’s lawyers have done too little to stand in the way of government policies he labeled unconstitutional. He noted the strong reaction of Pakistan’s lawyers last year when that country’s leader threatened the integrity of its justice system.

“Did you see our beloved profession up in arms here?” Nader asked. “Lawyers in Pakistan were marching. Where were our lawyers?”

The UConn law school chapters of the ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild brought Nader, a Winsted native, to Hartford. The event drew roughly 100 law students, as Nader urged future jurists to observe a duty beyond zealous representation of their clients. “A lawyer’s role is to look out for the administration of justice,” he said.

Nader placed much of the blame on America’s system of legal education, which he said has spent too much time teaching substantive law and too little encouraging students to think critically about why the law is what it is.

Nader attended law school in the 1950s at Harvard — an institution with which one law student in attendance said Nader seems to have “a love-hate relationship.”

“We were told we were being taught by the best and brightest law professors the world could produce,” Nader said. “And if you doubted [they were the best and brightest], you could just ask them.”

But Nader said his legal education failed to address deeper issues behind substantive law. His Corporations Law professor assigned case upon case from Delaware, Nader recalled, without explaining so many companies incorporate in that state because of its corporate-friendly laws. Law students must be made aware of corporate influences on the legal system, he said.

[Law.com]