Everyone Lawyer

Solution One

I. Abolish Lawyers’ Privileges and Monopoly—Let Everyone Be a Lawyer

The privileges and monopoly of lawyers must be abolished!

Everyone should be allowed to provide legal services and compete with licensed lawyers. Through competition, legal professionals will gradually become more capable, more ethical, and more normal.

I came to the United States in 2016 and later became a licensed landscape contractor. Most of the contractors I have encountered are kind, friendly, and ethical. They perform their work seriously and carefully. In most other professions, good people also greatly outnumber bad people. The legal profession, however, appears to be the exception: too few good lawyers and too many bad ones. Based on my personal experience, most lawyers I have encountered have been arrogant, ignorant, or unethical.

The primary reason for this difference is competition.

In the contracting industry, licensed contractors face competition from homeowners performing their own work, other licensed contractors, skilled specialists, and related service providers. This competition forces licensed contractors to pursue higher quality, better service, and more advanced technology to distinguish themselves from ordinary people.

The legally privileged class, however, has constructed a moat to prevent ordinary people from competing with lawyers. A judge needs only to order a layperson to stop providing legal services. After that, no one except a licensed lawyer may provide legal representation, and everyone else can only watch helplessly from the outside.

This is unfair, unreasonable, and unscientific.

If licensed lawyers are truly more professional and capable, they should prove their value through competition—not protect themselves through legal privilege and a monopoly enforced by judicial dictatorship.

“We the People” must change all of this!

Solution Two

II. Make the Courts Transparent—Let the People Record Judicial Proceedings

We must bring transparency into the courtroom and open it to freedom of expression. “We the People” should be allowed to record judicial proceedings to check and balance the nearly dictatorial power judges exercise inside the courtroom.

Most forms of tyranny do not exist in the United States because the media and ordinary people can expose and criticize public officials at almost no cost.

But this does not fully apply to judges. Judges can order people to stop making audio or video recordings, and anyone who refuses may be threatened with contempt of court.

I personally had such an experience. When I attempted to speak at a hearing, the judge prevented me from speaking on the ground that I had to speak through my lawyer. But lawyers may become the enemies of ordinary people. How can they always represent “We the People”? In my view, my litigation loss resulted from incapable and unethical lawyers. Since my personal experience has taught me that many lawyers are unethical, how can I be forced to trust them?

We therefore need the right to represent ourselves, and we need all judicial proceedings to be transparent. Only a small number of cases involving genuine privacy, safety, or other special concerns should be excepted.

Courts may argue that they are already transparent because court reporters are available to make official records.

Absolutely not!

Court reporters work with courts on a continuing basis. Ordinary people have every reason to ask whether court reporters will protect “We the People” or prioritize maintaining good relationships with the courts. Moreover, the high cost of court-reporting services prevents most ordinary people from hiring court reporters to preserve judicial proceedings.

Without transparency, the courtroom is a black box, and the judge is the operator inside that black box.

We must break the courtroom black box because the justice system is not moving toward justice—it is moving in the opposite direction.

The simplest and least expensive way to break open the darkness of the courtroom black box is to allow “We the People” to record judicial proceedings with our own cameras.