The nation’s roughly 200 American Bar Association law schools create a dense smog of conceptual, ideological, and rhetorical pollution that spreads across the country like smokestack exhaust drifting far from its source, but there is a larger problem that begins in the law school “boiler room” itself.

Suppose you were propositioned by a firm (a law school) to give them a quarter of a million dollars and in return, you were promised to be trained for professional employment and told you could expect a salary that in two years at work would equal your investment (a two-year, self-liquidating payback), and that an income annuity equal to 50% of your capital outlay (tuition) would accrue with an expected rate of return over five times the market rate (that you could “beat the market”). First, however, you had to pay an “application” fee; take third-party fee-based exams and then commit three years of your professional life to full-time uncompensated labor (helping professors write books and articles; manage law reviews; and conduct word-of-mouth, referral, network, and multi-level marketing, among other tasks) with foregone income equal to your investment, plus uncompensated living, travel, and other expenses. Suppose you also found out that most of the members of the firm propositioning you, had no risk capital whatsoever in the venture, and were drawing salary, benefits, and expenses directly pro rata from your investment?

Suppose you found out that was just window dressing; what regulators call “false and deceptive advertising;” inflated claims; undisclosed risk; inducement; in short, investor fraud? 

What if you learned that many of your fellow investors were actually in on the scheme?  That they were intent, not on following any such opportunities at all, but instead becoming part of the problem -- of perpetuating more crime and fraud; indeed, being effectively encouraged in precisely how to use the law school’s operating manuals (doctrine, case books, and rhetoric) in creating social and racial division, violence, property destruction, leaking and infiltrating the actual judicial and legislative infrastructure (what UChicago Law Emeritus and NYU Law’s Richard A. Epstein asserts is the multiplicative nature of criminal conspiracies from gains in trade).

Now at the end of your investment program, you find out that you actually had the investment within you all along (in natural law); in fact, you are the investment, and the firm, merely a harvesting and shearing machine, with you as its crop.

Law schools are regulated businesses like brokerage firms.  The ABA (American Bar Association) is like the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) and while both host revolving doors and are often captured, the ABA isn’t really an arms-length regulatory or enforcement mechanism: it’s a club with members of the “Bar” (who celebrate more like a Bar Mitzvah). The school of law, as Harvard Law graduate and famed consumer rights advocate Ralph Nader points out, should be divided to include a school of lawlessness.  Except that Nader doesn’t realize that it already exists, rather cleverly, as a hang-out, hide-out, and processing plant of lawlessness itself.

Take the so-called “Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court,” which has nothing to do with the putative president (it was organized privately by the Obama Foundation) or even with the Court -- it’s a RICO operation to fix the rulings by packing the bench, and made up of law professors from the “T14” of so-called top law schools (which is more like the MS-13) that work as fixers and plumbers in systematic operations like voter fraud rigging.

In these ways the law school is also like a money-laundering business: it takes taxpayer funding (501c3 status and federal tuition finance flows) and washes millions of dollars a year into “lawfare” programs and subsidizes special interests, which then distribute hundreds of millions of dollars annually to the family of capos and captains like the teachers' unions: and you are their student mules.

The beauty, perhaps, of this operation is that no real convincing or even selling is effectively needed: it sells itself.  Indeed, the inductees want to be deceived and are schooled in self-deception.  That is the great power of language, and words: law is centered in language and meaning is at the pleasure of the syndicate.  Like the gang, it has its mottos, oaths, tattoos, and secret passwords.  It swears allegiance to the Bar and its edifice which then prints the currency of the legal trade, the fiat money of authority, rules, punishment, and reward.  In due time its debts must be extinguished and inflated away.  Everyone will forget and the endless train of followers will finally receive what they really pined for: final absolution from inconvenient thoughts.

Justice may be blind, but law requires that the eyes be wide open, and the scale replaced with the shield and the sword.  The roughly 200 law school “camps” in the U.S. are arranged in a syndicate and franchise that feeds the Bar cartel through its satellites of business fronts -- the university.  Their books are closed, their expenses undisclosed and concealed. 

Finally, in a less polemic and more pragmatic context of liability, what should students, and the public generally, think of a body of putative legal scholars who are silent on crime?  What are we to make of an academy of law that is excitable, vocal, and activist over skin color, political candidates, and infanticide, but is silent if complicit in officially sanctioning and encouraging violence, private and public property destruction, involuntary manslaughter, government corruption, denial of habeas corpus on political affiliation, vote purchasing, illegal medical mandates, technically suppressed speech, non-consensual executive orders, or undeclared wars?  What of the rolling, slow-boil constitutional crisis in systematic government constitutional violations (if utter contempt) such as mass illegal immigration?

And what of the intellectual, emotional, and cognitive harm from the law academy’s private adoption of whatever ideological fad may strike the fancy of Left professors and administrators (over 80%) concerning any number of synthetic fabrications either in concept, method, or application standards of teaching, such as “critical theories” or ideologies of equity, or even outright inventions of legal fantasy such as 14th Amendment indulgences in category creation (such as groups, versus its actual intent: individuals).  Whoever asked for or consented to, such intellectual pollution?  Are the nation’s 200 law schools more like coal-fired plants that emit black smoke, which drifts across the land, intoxicating the public space?  Is there a “smokestack” problem in law training that Ronald Coase otherwise described in The Problem of Social Cost? Do law schools, through lawfare culture that destabilizes society, create uncompensated disservices?  How does the deliberate adulteration of fact and data, let alone history and reality, figure into intentional torts in psychological well-being such as the 1619 project, and pretentious, self-serving remedies such as reparations, for example, or “White terror” or organized law school conferences in election fraud normalization?  Who pays for perverting legal doctrine and polluting intellectual and cognitive fidelity?

As for strict liability, negligence, and intentionality, the “boundary question” is porous and recovery, including in the spectrum of public and private dimensions, is subject to active discovery, clarification, and eventual legislated remedy.

Matthew G. Andersson is a science and technology professional, former CEO, and author.  He has been featured in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and the 2001 Pulitzer Prize report by the Chicago Tribune and attended the University of Texas at Austin, Yale University, and the University of Chicago.  He is the author of the upcoming book Legally Blind: How Ideology Has Captured the Law School, the Judiciary and the Constitution and has testified before the U.S. Senate.

Image: Michael D. Beckwith - PxHere