Attorneys of America, beware: after health care, reform is coming to you next. Singlepayerlegal.org is a new website arguing for legal costs and care to be made available for all Americans equally. As some of their demands, the people at Singlepayerlegal.org hope for a system “in which all attorneys are salaried, and are required to provide legal services to all-comers, regardless of income or disparity-group status, at fair and stable reimbursement rates determined by a Department of Legal Services (DLS).” The idea is to apply to attorneys the same kind of system that is being applied to doctors, thanks to the new health care reform act. But doing so is likely to be a very difficult process, not least because it would involve going up against the attorneys in America who are most likely to best be able to prevent this kind of change from coming about in the first place.
The idea that the system of attorneys in America should be altered is not a new one, as it has been argued by many policy makers and thinkers for years now. This latest push, however, seems to have greater significance, as it is coming so soon after the major changes of the health care bill were voted into policy. While the majority of America has not turned its focus onto this issue of attorneys, it is not impossible that after the dust has settled around the health care debate, in the favor of one side or the other, then the next topic of contention may be equally available attorneys.
According to the website of Singlepayerlegal.org, “280 million Americans lack basic legal care insurance, making it impossible to get the affordable legal care that they need and deserve.” The website also makes arguments that point out that American attorneys offer no greater services than do attorneys of other nations such as Britain and Japan, where legal costs are substantially lower. While all Americans do technically have the right to an attorney in a criminal trial, these attorneys are often poorly trained or negligent, and not the quality of lawyer that citizens might be able to have if only the costs weren’t so terribly high.
The website also points a number of other startling statistics about attorneys, ranging from the fact that most attorneys provided only eight minutes of pro-bono legal work per day to those who needed it, to the fact that 75% of poor Americans who get involved with a serious legal problem each year simply cannot pay the necessary costs to hire an attorney. According to Singlepayerlegal.org, attorneys in America could be providing significantly more in the way of services for citizens, ensuring that each citizen receives as much legal aid as he or she might need. Instead, attorneys are primarily motivated by the large amounts of money they can earn by charging such exorbitant prices, regardless of the fact that a large number of Americans simply cannot afford attorneys’ services.
The issue is, of course, not simple at all. Attorneys have as much of a right to make a profit from their work as do any workers, and the fact that their work requires such a specific and highly honed set of skills does support the high prices which attorneys are able to charge. Yes, this does prevent some individuals from having access to the services of an attorney, but this would seem to be an inherent function of the capitalist system, as opposed to a terrible flaw. It is not unlike the system with doctors, in which doctors have their own highly specialized and focused set of skills, which allows them to charge high prices for their services. But the services of a doctor are rather unlike the services of an attorney. Whereas access to a doctor may blatantly and directly mean the difference between life and death, access to an attorney doesn’t necessarily have the same immediate effect. Indeed, an attorney’s job is much more fluctuating and uncertain than that of a doctor, if only because an attorney’s job is based inherently off of interpretation and supporting that interpretation. For all that doctors still need interpretation, medicine is closer to a science than law. Attorneys’ services are, therefore, of a rather different nature than those of doctors, and as a result, it is not clear that attorneys’ services should be as available as doctors’.
The primary reason that one could argue for attorneys to be available to all Americans equally is that, if they are not available, then you do encounter many circumstances in which equality is undermined. Some might argue that equality is not necessarily as much of a value of America as it might initially seem; capitalism simply guarantees a certain level of equality, but it does not actually guarantee utter equality. That being said, however, it does stand out when one side of a conflict may hire a bank of very skilled, very expensive attorneys with years of experience, capable of easily making that side’s case, whereas the other side can afford no attorneys at all, and therefore is at a significant disadvantage. In such a case, regardless of what the facts are, it is possible that the side with the stronger bank of attorneys may be able to win, thus unbalancing the nature of the justice system. The justice system, at least, should be equal and unbiased, and for some citizens to have access to resources which can tip the balance of the justice system into their favors, while others lack access to those same resources, is clearly an issue of inequality.
The issue could be aided simply by ensuring that all provided attorneys for defendants are effective and capable, but this is problematic for obvious reasons. Those attorneys who are likely most effective at their jobs are also likely the most expensive attorneys, and the least likely to be in the position of a public defender, not earning much money. Though this is perhaps too much of a blanket statement on attorneys, and there surely are exceptions, it does seem to be a fairly accurate generalization.
The issue of whether or not to ensure equal access to attorneys in a similar way as has been done with doctors is very, very complex; regardless of whether or not it should be case, it is entirely likely that no change will be made on the issue for quite some time, simply because of the complexity of dealing with all of the different interests and parties surrounding it. Nonetheless, on the heels of the health care reform act, it is worth imagining what else might be changed for the better.