Maria Shriver has hired notorious divorce lawyer Laura Wasser to handle her pending divorce from the movie star and former governor. The Schwarzenegger fortune is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions, and could result in one of the most costly divorces in history, which would provide a bonanza to California’s family law attorneys.
Although the Schwarzenegger divorce is an outlier due to the vast sums of money involved, it still provides some insight into the shady realm of family law, which employs an army of attorneys. In our society, attorneys are a necessity, and not always an evil one, but it’s time people began to question not only the moral, but practical aspects of an industry that feeds on family strife.
I have friends who are lawyers, and they are quite open about the fact that their jobs do not create wealth. Of course, this doesn’t mean that they don’t provide an important service; one could think of attorneys as the grease in the machine that keeps it from seizing up. However, the political influence of the legal industry is, more often than not, directed toward promoting self-serving legislation and policy. This is to be expected, but due to certain characteristics of the American political system attorneys have a huge advantage in promoting themselves over, say, farmers or manufacturers. It has often struck me as odd that Americans tend to reflexively assume that “Big Oil” runs the country when the number of politicians involved in the oil industry at some point is dwarfed by the number who have participated in the legal industry. In fact, there’s a better case to be made for big law running the country, and at least oil enhances productivity…
There’s little doubt that family law attorneys play a big part in eating away at household wealth in the US, and serve to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few. Given the costs of divorce and custody litigation, it’s also fair to say that many of these attorneys are growing fat at the expense of children.
Unsurprisingly, feminist policy has proven to be a great boon to the family law industry, which raises the question of whether attorneys and their lobbying groups ever really believed in it in the first place, or whether it was simply used as a means to slide money into their pockets. For example, providing incentives to women to divorce makes great business sense if it initiates divorce. Creating abusive, inflexible child-support guidelines and draconian DV policies also works in attorneys’ favor, because men who refuse to hire them almost always get taken for a ride or railroaded. Winner-takes-all custody policy is yet another example. The list goes on…
Is this a coincidence, or simply some unforeseen side-effect of feminism? Of course it is neither. It is quite clearly a result of unchecked greed. If you really want to find who is pushing this or that policy, follow the money.
