Why should we need lawyers?

Just as it once made sense that a largely illiterate population should elect a small number of citizens to represent them in parliament, it once made sense that a small number of educated and literate professionals should make their living advising and assisting citizens in legal matters. Does it still make sense?

In our present society, we need lawyers. We need them to draw up wills, to assist in the conveyancing of property, to advise and advocate when marriages break down, to defend us if we are accused of crime. Why do we need them? We need them because no one who has not been thoroughly schooled in the arcane practice of the law can possibly manage those tasks simply by reading the law.

This is wrong. Worse, it is not necessary.

The reason you cannot read the laws pertaining to, say, transfer of property and be confident that you can now act lawfully and in your own interests in conducting the purchase or sale of land is because the laws are written in a way which is deliberately, shamefully, obfuscatory.

How can we improve the situation? We can rewrite our laws in plain English. We can determine that all laws should be able to be understood by any citizen of normal intelligence and rewrite them accordingly. We are lucky in Australia that we have a system of common law. This is extremely helpful for laws written in plain English because it removes the objection that 'plain English' is not exact enough and will lead to uncertainty in the application of law.

Common law means that questions of law can be settled by judges and their judgement sets a precedent for future applications of the law. Suppose we had a law that stated, "You may not steal another person's property." Further suppose that I had brought a case against Mr X claiming that he had stolen an umbrella from my office and that Mr X's defence was that the umbrella actually belonged to my brother and that I, therefore, had no case against him. A judge might rule that "another person's property" could include property which was under the control of that person. Once that precedent is set, this becomes part of the 'common' law and is applied in any subsequent cases. Should the wording be found to be so ambiguous as to be unworkable, the precedent set by a judge can be codified into law.

In other words, we shouldn't be frightened to insist that our laws should be available to all of us. If it is not reasonable for citizens to represent themselves in most situations in our courts, the problem is not with the citizens, but with the legal system itself and we need to change it.

It might be argued that rewriting our laws is so massive a job, that it is impractical. It is not impractical; it is a big job. It will need time and resources. Well, we can find time and resources to host Olympic Games, to go on military adventures overseas, to build freeways, to fund the bread and circuses beloved of modern democracies; why shouldn't we fund the reorganisation and rewriting of our laws? It may take ten years. It may take twenty. It's worth it. And it gives the great army of solicitors and barristers time enough to retrain as something useful.