2009 State of the Profession Address
By the Hon. Justice Perram
Federal Court of Australia

Presented at The NSW Young Lawyers’ 
Civil Litigation Committee Address 
Colin Biggers & Paisley, Lawyers 
Sydney, 27 August 2009 

Madam Chair, Mr de Souza,

Neither the existence of the practice of law nor its apparent popularity appear to change much over time.  For many thousands of years lawyers have been involved in the administration of states and in the central parts of most developed societies.  Sophisticated legal systems were in place by at least 1790BC.  We know that from the codex of Hamurabi which, not unlike the tax legislation of this country, is engraved on a 7 foot basalt pillar which the enthusiastic can view at the Louvre in Paris.  It provides an entertaining diversion from the endless marble fauns down the corridor.  It also contains many useful principles – although the penalties it suggests seem a little harsh to the modern mind.  It even has a brief building code:
 
“If a Builder builds a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls in and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.”

Such a rule is not, as Gleeson CJ might say, nuanced.  One does not discern from the codex any particular caste of lawyers.  But by the time of the Roman Emperor Justinian things were very different.  By then, there was not only a caste of lawyers but a vast collection of laws and writings about those laws.  The genius of Justinian was to arrange them in a convenient way.  In fact, we see a precise prefiguring of the way in which modern law is practiced in Justinian’s Institutes because, although the Institutes are said to be Justinian’s they were in fact written by a lesser mortal called Tribonian – Justinian, like the modern partner, merely affixed the imperial imprimatur in a brief introduction addressed – I do not jest – to “Young Enthusiasts for Law”.  It is dated 21 November 533 and finishes with the worthy advice:

“Study our [he means his] law.  Do your best and apply yourselves keenly to it. Show that you have mastered it.  You can then cherish a noble ambition; when your course in law is finished you will be able to perform whatever duty is entrusted to you in the government of our state.”

The words “whatever duty is entrusted to you” are, as Justice Gummow would no doubt say, ambulatory words of broad construction.  As many of you have, no doubt realised by now, they are sufficiently flexible to explain the phenomenon that it is junior solicitors and barristers who always get to buy the coffee or upon whom is bestowed the privilege of plumbing the nights by combing the repealed regulations for the lost Market Gardening Regulation (No. 4) of 1977.

What then of the popularity of the profession? 

We have a clear picture from Shakespeare’s Henry VI Act 4 Scene 2.  One character, with a name which sounds like it came from CSI Miami – Jack Cade - is describing a Utopia and another – naturally enough called Dick the Butcher – cries out “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

Modern sentiment has not changed terribly much.  But, as always, the public mind is a little contradictory on the topic.  Few days pass without one part of the media or another chiding lawyers for overcharging, under-servicing; another popular theme is the leniency of judge’s sentencing decisions.  From time to time, there are the scandals of the law which always provide an entertaining counterpoint to the scandals of football and cricket. In the early nineties, there was the partner of a well-known Sydney firm, who misappropriated a substantial sum of money and invested it with shadowy figures in the world of international finance who lacked the manners, as events transpired, to return it. More recently, we have had the spectacle of the drunken judge and the speeding judge. Curiously, scandals of accountants and architects seem somehow less news worthy and it will be a long time between drinks for those who are connoisseurs of actuarial disgrace. 

But here’s the curiosity: whilst the off-field antics of the NRL provide endless fodder for what the news services, there are basically no television programmes about footballers. The one exception to that may be the gripping drama of Footballers Wives, a UK soap about the travails of marriage to a soccer star. 

No one, I need add, has ever attempted a cricket soap.

But with lawyers, the opposite seems true.  The airwaves are awash in shows about lawyers and have been for a long time.   I have always been a Rumpole fan but our friends across the Pacific have been prodigious in producing their own special brand of lawyers shows.  We have had Ally McBeal and Boston Legal; more recently, we have had the wonderfully vampy Paddy Hughes in Damages.  Nor has cinema or theatre lagged far behind.  Who will forget Witness for the Prosecution, Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men, Keanu Reeves in The Devil’s Advocate or the deeply instructive Legally Blonde or even Legally Blonde II.

What this shows is that whilst people in principle find the concept of law rather discomforting, they find the spectacle of it altogether different.  The reason for that is that legal disputation, whilst expensive and awful actually to be involved in, is widely believed to involve great drama.  That view is not only held by the public at large but by many people choosing to study law and, even by a small group of lawyers.

Last year I tried a two week tax trial in which, the lawfulness of certain extensively claimed deductions, was argued up hill and down dale.  There were no moments of drama; Perry Mason did not appear at the back of the court room just before we moved to submissions with a mystery witness wearing a veil.  There were no blood stained draft 1997 accounts produced at the last moment to a collective gasp from the people sitting in the gallery.  In fact, apart from a few bored looking office boys with trolleys there was no-one in the gallery at all.  The newspapers completely failed to take any interest in the matter at all.  I was not splashed across A Current Affair for being soft of dividend imputation.  Thus reality differs from perception.

What then is the explanation for the growing fascination with lawyers and our unremitting lack of popularity? The latter is easily answered I think.  Most people’s perceptions of lawyers are driven entirely by a litigious model of what lawyers do. Litigators deal with arguments and, inevitably, arguments have two sides at least in the cases which get on television.  Nothing sells like polarisation and a controversial court case always divides public beliefs.  I think the most extreme example of that in Australian legal history was probably the case of Lindy Chamberlain.  Everyone in the country had an opinion – the case was played out – no doubt to the distress of all concerned – as part of a national drama.  The lawyers inevitably became identified with the clients.   In such cases, because everyone disagrees with one side or the other, everyone inevitably project their dislike for the opposing view on to the people who are putting it.  If you hate the merchants of death you are hardly going to like their lawyers; and heaven help you if you do something as socially tactless as appearing for someone charged with a serious criminal offence. 

There is, I think, no point complaining about this phenomenon.  It is part of the territory. But it does not explain the growing fascination in the popular mind with the law.  It is about that issue that I wish to say a few words.

There is no doubt I think that the number of lawyers in the last 40 years has seen a dramatic increase.  Further, there can be no real question that lawyers, in general, are much more observable than they were half a century ago.  There were no equivalents to the large law firms of today even 50 years ago.  Nor was it the case that one saw advertisements for lawyers on the back of taxis even 20 years ago.  The concept of a “corporate lawyer” would have been foreign to a nineteenth century solicitor even though work of that kind was done. 

Now we have thousands of lawyers doing work of every description.  We even have organisations of lawyers: there are lawyers who are in favour of forests, there are, no doubt, lawyers against forests as well; there are institute of intellectual property lawyers, criminal lawyers, industrial lawyers and so on.  Indeed, as you will have no doubt have worked out, each of these is its own little tribe with its own little culture.  Thus we know that in industrial courts it is usual to “tender” an affidavit and a written submission; a notion that horrifies equity lawyers to their core.  And, so it would seem, the dissolute practice of tendering of affidavits leads to a dissolute culture which makes the drinks parties of industrial lawyers much more entertaining – or certainly much more taxing – than, for example, the cocktail parties of those who ponder the exercise by unregistered higher mortgagees of powers of sale. 

This diversity of legal culture reflects the very great diversity of legal work which these days is done.  How has that diversity arisen? Has the increase in the number of lawyers been a response to an increase in the need for legal services or is it the cause of the increase in the use of legal services?

An economist would be likely to doubt the latter proposition.  If the number of lawyers had increased without any increase in the amount of legal work being done then one would have expected the cost of legal services to fall as supply outstripped demand. Instead, the opposite appears to be the case.  Despite waves of reform and deregulation legal cost and expense continues to rise.  It is popular to blame the lawyers for this.  But a hard headed economist would attribute that inexorable rise in cost either to market inefficiencies or to an excess of demand.  For a long time, the legal profession was – perhaps justly – accused of operating as a closed shop.  But no-one who works in the modern profession, with its ferocious competition on costs and the endless process of fee disclosure would doubt, I think, that the legal market is very competitive. 

No, the real answer to the rise in the cost of lawyers and litigation is because there is an increased demand for their services and the supply of lawyers is not insufficient to meet the demand.

There is a well known story of the town with one lawyer who one day is confronted with the arrival, from another town, of a second lawyer.  Asked by the publican at the local hotel whether he is concerned that his business will be halved, the first lawyers responds by saying that he expects it to double.  There is no doubt an element of truth in this.  The presence of lawyers invariably calls for the presence of more lawyers.  However, I do not think this phenomenon lies at the heart of the increase for the demand for legal services.

Rather, a more likely explanation is that there are more lawyers because there are more laws.  To make this point clear it is necessary to retrace some steps and go back a little into legal history.

Statute law, as we all know, comes from Parliaments.  Surprisingly few of us can say when parliament really started as a law making body.  There were definitely things which we call statutes around by the thirteen century – Magna Carta is a good example.  But if one looks at these alleged statutes they do not really resemble the product of any parliamentary process we would understand.  In those times, the power to make laws was lodged firmly in the King.  He was the source of executive, legislative and judicial power.  It was only very slowly that the legislative function became divorced from his person.

That process of divorce involved a civil war and the restoration.  The civil war is often painted as being concerned with a puritan revolution and no doubt there was an element of that.  But another very powerful force leading to the deposing of Charles I was insistence by the Crown that it would levy and spend taxes without parliamentary approval.  It is a bold fact which history teaches that taxation without representation inevitably leads to trouble.  It led Charles I to the scaffold and was the immediate cause of the American War of Independence.

Once the power of to raise and spend taxes depended upon the approval of Parliament it became necessary for the King to curry favour with the Parliament.  In practice, this meant that his advisers (we call them ministers) needed to be able to command a majority on the floor of the commons.  This was often a fraught affair.  The political parties in the 18th century were less developed than they are now.  In practice, politics was a three cornered contest involving the Whigs, the Tories and the Crown.  But the practical reality remained that the King needed parliamentary support in order to have access to funds.

Gradually this reduced the power of the Crown.  Up until George III the King had always appointed his own advisers – his ministers – but it became apparent, after some time, that Parliament insisted that it should selected his advisers.  George III was the last King who took issue with that proposition appointing a prime minister who did not command a majority on the floor of the commons.  This venture failed when the money ran out.  Ever since then the Crown has accepted that its principle adviser is the person who is able to secure the money from the parliament.  Gradually, the power has moved from the Crown to that adviser, the modern prime minister.  We call the political reality that the King must accept that person as principle adviser as a constitutional convention.  But to my mind, there is nothing conventional about it; it is a reality that the Crown has gradually become acquainted with. 

There thus came into being the circumstances in which the control of the state and the control of the law making body came into the hands of a small group of persons who we are accustomed to call the government. 

With that occurrence the law making function of parliament appears to have increased dramatically.  For the first time, there were people with an agenda to fulfil and the ability to carry it out.  Unsurprisingly, we find a significant increase in the amount of legislation being passed. 

That trend has continued into the modern day.  In 1920 the Commonwealth Parliament passed 56 Acts.  Showing that nothing old is new it is worth noting Act 56 of that year, the River Murray Waters Act – an act to sort out the problems with the Murray River.  Act No. 55 also has a certain piquancy, it was entitled the Industrial Peace Act 1920.  It is worth reflecting on the nature of these laws.  Earlier legislative jaunts had tendered to focus either on private matters (one needed an act to obtain a divorce) or upon matters which we identify as being centrally about law.  The Statute of Frauds which required certain contracts to be in writing is a good example; the Statute of Anne which dealt with charities is another.  This is not a completely accurate picture but it is true, I think, that a smaller nation state with a smaller government had not yet turned its mind to widespread regulation.

The River Murray Waters Act and the Industrial Peace Act are both examples, much more familiar to the modern eye, of the government of the day having Parliament make laws about what might be called social matters.  Put another way, whilst one might expect discourse about contracts and charities to be one which involves laws, one might not expect river and industrial administration to be the same. 

The trend continued.  By 1950 the Parliament’s appetite for legislation has swollen.  It passed 79 Acts including the Conciliation and Arbitration Act and the celebrated, although short lived, Communist Party Dissolution Act.  Again, notice the social nature of those laws. 

What I venture to suggest is that the growth of the modern parliament, and the control that politicians of the day have over that parliament, has led to a culture in which governments are not just expected to govern but to use the law making function they control as part of that process of government.  There has therefore been a shift away from government by pure exercise of executive authority – as the King used to do – and towards a government one of whose essential elements is the making of laws.

The Whitlam government, which came to power in 1972, exemplifies the process.  That year saw the passage of 221 separate Acts.  The topics are dizzying in scope: the Death Penalty Abolition Act, the Royal Style and Titles Act, the Mental Health and Related Services Act, the Seas and Submerged Lands Act, the Honey Export Charge Act, the Albury Wadonga Development Act, my personal favourite, the Australian Apple and Pear Corporation Act and notably the Law Reform Commission Act.

This process has not abated.  Indeed, it has only gathered pace.  Not only is the number of topics being regulated by Parliament dramatically increasing but also the detail of the regulation.  It is an aspect of my work that I spend a lot of time looking at corporate laws and tax laws.  The Companies Act 1961 (NSW) was a modest work which fitted easily on ordinary paper into the confines of a slim book.  It had one section dealing with the duties of directors which said that they had to do their job properly.  Fast forward to 2009 – we have the Corporations Act 2001.  Four inches thick on tissue paper, it runs to over 3,500 pages.  Gone is a simple section saying directors must do their job properly; instead, we have the War and Peace of Chapter 2D which runs to 36 pages from s 179 to s 206HB.  A perusal of these provisions is not for the feint hearted.  I hazard to suggest that they say little more than that directors should do their job properly. 

If the position of the Corporations Act 2001 is challenging the position of the tax laws is epic.  My copy of the income tax laws – not other taxes, just income taxes – runs to three volumes and thousands and thousands of pages.  I have not weighed it but I am sure it is several kilograms.  I will not trouble you with any of its obscurities.  It suffices to say that questions arise in its interpretation that are very far from the world of Perry Mason. 

I make these points not to complain (on this occasion) about the volume or the size of the legislation but to point to it as an aspect of the modern form of government.  Is it surprising if the Parliament is producing thousands and thousands of pages of legislation each year that there is a proliferation of legal issues across the community?

I think that the answer to that question must be that it is not surprising.  The flipside of the modern phenomenon of governments making laws about any and everything is a creeping legalization of all forms of public debate.  Already, many controversial political matters are played out before the courts.  The time is long gone when one could simply add a back verandah to one’s house.  Now the whole process is regulated and attached to that regulation is the delightful possibility of litigation with one’s neighbours.  To look at the standard contract for the sale of land is likewise to see an explosion in regulatory requirements – there are documents which must be attached; environmental reports, surveys; worse still “prescribed documents”.  There are few people who would wisely undertake their own conveyancing; fewer still who might chance their arm against the tax laws.

This proliferation in the number of laws and their lengths is, I think, likely to continue and to increase.  This is because it is driven by an aspect of modern society which arises from the interplay between the modern politician and the modern press.  Nothing sells news better than a crisis or a debacle.  And there is nothing politicians like more than to be seen to be doing something.

There are a number of such crises around at the moment which are in the news: there has been the Global Financial Crisis (GFC”), there is the GWC, that is, the global warming crisis, the PTC, that is, the NSW public transportation crisis and, of course, the MDC (Murray Darling Crisis).  Apart from these transient crises, there are a series of bellwether crises that persist from age to age and lend continuity to our sense of what it is to be Australian: the education crisis, the alcohol crisis, the drugs crisis, the 100 year crisis relating to industrial affairs – a special crisis suffered only by the supporters of those who are not in government. 

Each of these problems is complex.  People disagree about whether there is a problem, what the problem is and what the range of solutions are.  But you can be sure that whatever the response, legislation is always the answer.

The reasons for this are not hard to discern.  Barely a day goes by without a call for tough new laws of one kind or another.  From the politicians point of view one good thing about tough new laws is that they are quite inexpensive.  It costs nothing to double the penalty for driving an unregistered lawn mower but it costs real money to increase the number of inspectors to detect that offence, the number of lawyers prosecuting it or the number of judges hearing those prosecutions.  Thus the crises uncovered by the modern press are likely to engender legislative responses.  It is therefore I think true to suggest that the modern news cycle creates the incentive for the passage of laws.  I am not critical of this – my remarks are merely observations about how things are.  We should not expect that those who report the news should do anything more than try to sell newspapers or, in the case of TV, soap or breakfast cereal.  Nor should people have any expectations that politicians will not seek to exploit the way the news is reported. 

There are two examples I would like to give you.  The first is the ETS itself.  Leaving to one side one’s position on the underlying issue, it is instructive that the result reached for is legislative in nature.  Further not only is it legislative, but the legislation in question does not count amongst its virtues brevity.  The present bill - the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill 2009 is 427 pages of single spaced text in length.  If the bill becomes law it is obvious that a large number of lawyers will necessarily be involved in its operation.  There will be carbon reduction court cases – probably very expensive ones given the amounts of money likely to be involved.  No doubt a specialist area of carbon reduction credit litigation will arise just as specialists GST litigators presently exist even now.  And that leaves to one side the corporate lawyers and tax lawyers who will inevitably been drawn in.  These lawyers will not come from central casting.  Instead, they will come from the current ranks of the profession.  Many of them are probably drafting wills even as we speak.  The point to be made is that the ETS will have a demand side effect on legal services.  The phalanx of lawyers involved in ETS will have to come out of the general market and that can only drive the price of legal services in general up.

A second example concerns industrial law.  The last five years have shown as assumption on both sides of politics that workplace reform is to be achieved legislatively.  Paul Keating’s Workplace Relations Act 1996 encountered John Howard’s Workchoices amendments of 2005 and Workchoices itself has succumbed, at least for now, to Ms Gillard’s Fair Work Act 2009.  Each of these Acts is of great length and great complexity.  What response can there be to such laws but the engagement of lawyers? 

Nor is a consideration of the content of some of these laws likely to lead to a decrease in litigation.  It was in 1974 that the Parliament first outlawed misleading and deceptive conduct in s 52 of the Trade Practices Act.  No doubt this was a good thing to do – although the cynic might question whether there has been any substantial increase in commercial morality as a result.  What it has done, however, is to transform every commercial case into a very complex proceeding involving not just the usual “he said she said” dispute but also, and very significantly, an archaeological exhumation of whether anyone was in fact mislead into doing something to their detriment by the misleading conduct.  That kind of debate lengthens proceedings very substantially.  So too, the introduction into the that Act of provisions outlawing “unconscionable” conduct opens an even broader vista of potential litigation whose precise metes and bounds seem to be largely a function of one’s perception of what is unconscionable.  This may well turn out to be a good and beneficial law.  But one thing is clear it is not a law which is likely to lessen the scope of litigation.

I make these remarks not to suggest that the profession should not be concerned about cost and delay.  It should.  But I do think that it is possible that one very substantial source of that increased expense and delay is the Parliament itself and politicians of all political hues.  The truth is that legislative solutions generally give rise to a proliferation of lawyers.

This is not a crie de cour for the reduction of legislation.  Such a call would be quite unrealistic.  There is no reason to expect that modern governments will soon change tack and start implementing non-legislative solutions to the popular problems of the day. Nothing in the experiences of the European Union or the United States lends any support for the notion that regulation is likely to wane in the future.  On the contrary, a realist would have to say that more and more legislation is the likely way of the future. 

What implications does this have for the profession?  We must prepare ourselves for greater burdens as solicitors, barrister and judges.  There will be more laws, they will be long and difficult to apply, they will increase the burdens of our work and the expense to our clients.  For all that, the most likely outcome is that the profession will be blamed for the delay and the expense thereby occasioned.

Four years ago NSW introduced the Civil Procedure Act 2005 which included a s 56 which made the overriding purpose of the Act the achievement of the quick, just and cheap resolution of the real issues in the proceedings.  As I understand it, we in the federal sphere we are about to get something similar although I believe the Commonwealth Attorney-General favours the word “inexpensive” rather than cheap.

There are internal tensions in the expression quick, just and cheap.  The search for complete justice will inevitably involve a great deal of work.  It is unlikely to be quick and it is certain not to be cheap.  On the other hand, many things are quick and cheap but not often are they just too.  There are examples in our law books of quick, just and cheap dispute resolution.  The trial by ordeal (abolished by Innocent III in 1215) was quick and cheap and, at least at the time, was regarded as quite just.  Dispute resolution by coin tossing is cheap, quick and, in a sense, fair.  However, none of these commend themselves as particular exemplars for the administration of justice.

The reality is that a trial is not a commodity provided by the State in the manner that a grocer sells a lettuce.  It is the ultimate step by which the State readjusts people’s rights. The critical aspect of legal process is the need for impartiality and the need for the people who are involved in the process – particularly those who lose – to feel that the process was a legitimate one.  No doubt delay and expense have their part to play in what is regarded as legitimate and what is not – we already know justice delayed is justice denied.  However, it would be regrettable indeed if cost and expense became the sole lodestones by which the administration of justice was to be judged.

I mention that because an obvious effect of the increase in legislation is going to be an increase in the work of the courts.  Although legislation is, as I have endeavoured to show, a relatively low cost immediate solution to most problems it carries with it hidden costs.  The costs of running the courts and of litigants in having to appear in those courts is one such cost.  If I have concern for the future it is that eventually the drive to hear more and more complex cases more and more quickly for less and less cost will begin to degrade the efficacy of the system and, thereby, its legitimacy.  We are nowhere near that point at this stage but one does not need an especially vivid imagination to perceive the work of the courts if legislation continues to expand at the same pace it has for the last 20 years. 

To illustrate that point, I have next to my desk, as all the judges of my court do, a set of the Australian law reports which contain the decisions of all state and federal superior courts.  They start in 1973 with volume 1.  They reached volume 100 in 1991 which means that it took 18 years to produce 100 volumes.  Volume 200 was reached in 2003 which means that the next 100 volumes took 12 years.  We reached volume 250 in 2009 in 6 years flat.  This year has seen the publication of volumes 250 to 257 and its only August.  The same disturbing trend may be seen in the Commonwealth Law Reports.  The first 100 volumes were reached in 59 years; the second 100 in 41 years.  The law reports bear out the truth therefore that litigation is on the rise.

This brings me at length to you.  I do not think that the picture I have painted is a gloomy one for lawyers.  On the contrary, if I am right then the need for lawyers is on the march. I do not see, in the long run, downward forces on legal employment although, as John Maynard Keynes is said to have said “In the long run we are all dead”. 

I do see the onward and upward march of legal complexity.  As the entry marks for law have crept north the quality of lawyers has correspondingly increased.  The CVs of those who apply for the position as my associate leave me feeling deeply unworthy.  All of that brain power makes for a heady cocktail when it gets into the mixer with the very many complex legal concepts which these days exist.  I expect therefore the practice of law to become more and more difficult with greater and greater challenges.

And what of the negatives? There are aspects of the practice of law which are not fun. The profession is hierarchical and the distasteful work, under the force of professional gravity inevitably slides down the greasy pole.  Do not be disheartened by this.  A long time ago I worked as a paralegal at what was then Allen Allen and Hemsley.  My role in life was to push trolleys to and from court, occasionally deliver urgent envelopes, from time to time serve various important looking people with official documents and, often, to operate the photocopier, a skill which as far as I could see appeared to be lost upon graduation to the rank of solicitor.  I once spent a weekend in a room with no windows armed only with a paginator putting numbers – sequential numbers mind you – on a large bundle of documents.  After the first 6 hours or so the experience became kind of surreal, almost hypnotic.  On the second day, my eyes had begun to swirl and I began to approach a state of enlightenment.  Despite that I managed to do the whole bundle.  Another time, I spent weeks locked in a pharmaceutical company reading endless and turgid reports involving the effect of increasingly high doses of anti-anxiety drugs on cats.  At the higher does the cats looked to me as they had been at the paginator.  These times were not the most exciting in my life I confess, but they are amusing to think about in retrospect, particularly the cats.

Into the same category I throw my little known magnum opus about the complete set of road regulations between 1954 to 1998, authorising the construction of the Alpine Way at Thredbo.  I would like to think that one other human read this tour de force in the legislative arts but alas, I fear it is not so. 

My experience was principally as a barrister but I can say that most of learning as a lawyer came in my first 8 years or so from doing what I perceived at the time to be cases of less importance.  Yet it was in those cases that I learnt never to cross-examine a quantity surveyor cold; never have absolute faith that your client is telling you the complete truth no matter how dishonest the other side may appear; never be rude unnecessarily.  There are countless other bon mots which I could, like Polonius, deliver.

However, I will hold off.  Instead, I leave you to ponder some related questions.  If the scope and complexity of the law is to continue to grow at the rate it presently is are we approaching the limits of what the system can handle?  Is there an upper bound on how complex statute law may become?  If there is, how might that limit be enforced?  More importantly, if the impetus to make laws is to be accepted as a given, as I believe it should be, is it useful to think that a counter impetus might be created providing law makers with a motive to repeal laws or at least make them smaller?  What might that be? These are questions which subtend debate about any particular topic.  They can be approached in a manner largely free from most forms of ideology (although we all know this is never completely possible).  As someone who sees the daily grind of litigation, these are questions which I think deserve some attention.  I commend them to you. 

Thank you.

27 August 2009