Lawyers

Despite Sec. Salazar’s overblown praise for the agents involved, yesterday’s signing of an agreement between water supply and environmental advocates regarding Delta smelt water supply is a token act. Judging from their ho-hum reactions to the achievement, lawyers for both sides know it.

They are gearing up for a negotiation that will not result in token, less-than-a-week-long policy.

The DNP team, basking in 104+ Indian heat, finds relevant what Gandhi, who himself was a lawyer, said about the lawyers of his day (apologies to women lawyers everywhere):

I had learnt the true practice of law. I had learnt to find out the better side of human nature and to enter men’s hearts. I realized that the true function of a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder. The lesson was so indelibly burnt into me that a large part of my time during the twenty years of my practice as a lawyer was occupied in bringing about private compromises of hundreds of cases. I lost nothing thereby—not even money, certainly not my soul.

and

Lawyers are also men, and there is something good in every man. Whenever instances of lawyers having done good can be brought forward, it will be found that the good is due to them as men rather than as lawyers.

and

Lawyers will, as a rule advance quarrels instead of repressing them. Moreover, men take up that profession, not in order to help others out of their miseries, but to enrich themselves. It is one of the avenues of becoming wealthy and their interest exists in multiplying disputes. It is within my knowledge that they are glad when men have disputes.

The DNP would have preferred that advocates of both sides saved the money of their clients for the real litigation to come.

Even better, that money could have been used to repair levees, restore habitat, and feed unemployed farm workers.

Savvy California lawyers toying with federal administrators desperate for even the thinnest of accomplishments just isn’t fair play.