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Charles L. Cotton wrote: When I first started working on CHL in 1980, I wrote a bill for filing in the 1981 Regular Session. (It didn't get filed, because the murder of John Lennon with a handgun in December, 1980 caused a nationwide furor against handguns.)

Boy do I remember that. I was chairman of a fund that was jointly sponsored by the various sportsmen's clubs in Albany County NY (37 believe it or not.) The purpose of the fund was to try to stop a variety of anti-pistol permit tactics by the licensing officers.

In NY there have been "concealed carry" permits since 1911, of course you also have to get a permit just to own a handgun, and therein lay the rub.

The issuing authority was a hired or elected official who did the job on a full or part time basis. In other words, in some jurisdictions there was a staffer who was responsible for the issuance or non-issuance, but in many it fell on a judge, county or city, to do the task, and those who were anti-gun could bench veto permits just by never acting on them - no denial, which might be able to be appealed, just no action ever, usually because their workload was too heavy for unimportant stuff like that. When the Sullivan Law was enacted it was never envisioned to be so long lasting nor was it expected that so many people would want handguns.

So we found a test case and sued a judge, and were successful in making him act on the permit, which he denied, so we sued him again over the denial, and again and...

Concurrently we were running a campaign in the legislature to get coherent rules for pistol permit issuance or non-issuance (kind of "shall issue") and the Lennon was shot, in NY STATE and it became intuitively obvious that guns were already too easy to get in NY State or NY City, and our legislative effort went down in flames.

Our suits dried up our funds.

And then I wound up in the hospital, very sick, and nobody from the gun club came to visit, so, in a fit of pique, I quit the gun club, and of course the committee, and it (the committee) collapsed without my leadership. Well, that last is probably apocryphal, but the committee was never a force in politics again, if it could have been said to be one before.

I became the chair by making the motion at a joint meeting - everybody thought that what I proposed was a good idea, so they thought I should run with it. I often wished I had run from it.

Hey, I will not argue that legislation can be hard to read, and interpret, and understand, all I am saying is that lawyers are not necessarily, for all their acknowledged expertise, the best choice for writing the bills.

I think a good example is the Second Amendment.

This thing with the Harris County DA points up a little more of what I was saying too. Here we have a highly paid, and I suppose respected, attorney, who says the law is no good and that he will defy it. Can't he read?

Charles L. Cotton wrote:Jim, no offense taken.

Thanks, I assure you that none was meant.

Charles L. Cotton wrote:I simply mean I think the people who reduce the desired legislative intent to writing should be attorneys.


The reason I pointed out that less than 50% of Texas House Members and Texas Senators are attorneys is to counter the common belief that lawyers control the legislature. If we did, you certainly would never have seen the so-called "tort reform" bill a/k/a Insurance Company Protection and Profit Act. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

But then there's my example of NY's "Assembly Bill Drafting Committee" to consider too. All attorneys, working for the legislature writing bills, and they were merrily, in many more cases than the one I cited, writing the legislation to satisfy their boss, not the legislator who submitted the original bill. I would have to say that it should be the responsibility of the legislator who submitted the original to make sure that what he got back resembled what he submitted, but unfortunately the "overworked" legislators of NY State were far too busy to do sensible things like that.

Charles L. Cotton wrote:Much of the convoluted language we wind up with in bills/statutes is not the result of attorneys desiring to use such language from scratch, but is the result of compromises between friends and foes on any given issue. As a very general statement, the more opposing interests have to compromise, the more difficult it is to craft a bill that will yield the desired result, and do so within the constraints of the Texas Constitution. Another problem with going to “plain language� is that we are usually changing existing statutes that are written in “legalese� making it impossible to use “plain language� without an entire rewrite of the statute. Complete rewrites are very difficult and time consuming and are only rarely attempted.

So, to disburse the lynch mob, I do not believe only attorneys should decide what the law should be, only that they are better equipped to reduce the idea to writing that will be enforceable.


Regards,
Chas.

And I agree with you, at least in principle, it's just that I see our system of government, whether you call it a republic (which I think it is) or a democracy, has such pitfalls built in and it's those of us who are "politically aware" who must try to be the ones who watch the watchers.

Charles L. Cotton wrote:I think everyone is better served if people who will have to deal with legal issues in court on behalf of clients are the ones who write the bills that ultimately become law. Who better knows what language is needed to get the desired result? You wouldn't get an attorney to do the engineering on the space shuttle and you wouldn't get an accountant to perform your open-heart surgery. Why would you want your attorney to have to work with laws written by a car salesman?

As to simplicity, it often leaves too much room to differ, and that means more lawsuits. I see this often, when non-attorneys write their own contracts, then later find themselves in a dispute. Too many areas simply were not addressed.

Chairman Keel is an attorney and he wrote HB823. However, most bills are not written by their "authors" and certainly not their "co-authors." I've already posted on this subject, so I won't bore people by repeating it.

Regards,
Chas.

I have been sitting back and reading this interesting thread where some people seem to be totally ignoring what others are saying while attempting to argue with those self same others about what they were saying, and notice I expressed that in the plural. No names, but Charles is exempted from consideration.

But now I have to throw my own two cents in and contribute to thread drift in the process.

Many years ago I was privileged to be among the select few to be allowed to work on the telephone systems in the NY State Legislature and Capitol, as such I had back door access to the legislative process, something I was interested in for a variety of reasons. A person that I fervently supported got elected to the legislature at that time, and one of his first acts was to submit a piece of legislation that had been proposed to him by the coalition of sportsmen's clubs that had backe his election.

He submitted, as every legislator did in those days, his "blue line" draft of the proposed legislation to the Assembly Bill Drafting Committee." This group, actually chaired by a senior assemblyman but staffed by attorneys wrote virtually all legislation that was presented in the Assembly of the NY State Legislature, and there was a similar bunch operating on the Senate side. It was not only rare for legislation not to be run through Bill Drafting before submission, but it was also common for bills that had not followed that path to be referred there for cleanup after submission. Texas does something similar with bills that must be submitted for an economic impact study before they can be considered.

What the bill drafters did with my legislator's proposed legislation wasn't real pretty. They warped the original meaning around so that an originally pro-gun bill came out anti-gun. Of course our legislator witthdrew the legislation from consideration after seeing the changes that I pointed out to him, and probably would have paid little attention to the language unless it was pointed out to him, and earned the enmity of the gun owners of his district because he reneged on his promise, caught in a real Catch-22.

Although I agree that I wouldn't take my car to my doctor or expect my mechanic to be able to reduce my dislocated shoulder, I feel a little differently about our legislatures. Our legislatures are designed to be composed of a cross section of the populace (although that may be impossibel to accomplish these days) not just professional legislators and it scares me when people say that laws should be written by lawyers. I think that part of the reason why some of our laws are confusing is because of the "legalese" language that means nothing to anyone BUT the lawyers. Indeed, how are we supposed to obey the laws if we don't even understand them?

There is some to be said for attorneys doing sanity check on bills to see that all bases are covered, or that unintended consequences are pointed out, but I am uncomfortable with your statement, Charles, that attorneys should write the laws because they have to deal with them and understand the language. Laws should be written so that everyone, with certain exceptions (a reasonable person test?) understands them and if that makes it a little hard on the attorneys (although why it should I can't imagine) then maybe they need to consider a career change.

Not meant to be confrontational, just attempting to share an opposing viewpoint. I do, heartily, agree about non-attorneys writing their own contracts, been in the middle of one of those and don't want to do it again.