No. 4 in a Series about Massachusetts Disastrous Courts
Atty. Pawlick Discovered Excellent Courts in Pennsylvania
By MassNews Staff
       When Attorney J. Edward Pawlick (the founder of Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly in 1972) went to Pennsylvania Dutch country after graduating from law school in 1960, he found "Justices of the Peace " still operating in much of the state. The faculty at Harvard's Law School wouldn't like that.
       (Pawlick spent time at Yale Law School before being forced to leave because of a lack of money. The faculty there would not have liked it either.)

Judges Who Had Never Been to Law School?
       Those JP's hadn't read any of the volumes the professors had written on evidence, civil procedure or criminal procedure. They would have laughed at the thought. They were mostly older, respected farmers who had lived in their community all their life and had been elected in order to help their neighbors.
       They would say they just used common sense. After all, if they had a dispute in their own family, they would listen to everything that anyone wanted to say. They wouldn't go into deciding whether or not it was circumstantial evidence and get out the law books and spend many hours to make this decision on the "procedure" to be followed.
       They'd say things like: "Now Bill and Tommy, I've known both of you all your lives and I know your parents would be sad if they could be here to see you fighting like this. Why don't the two of you just go outside for a while and see if you can't settle this."
       But the law professors soon discovered that what the JPs had been doing for centuries certainly made sense. And they copied it. But they gave it a brand new name: "arbitration." It became the rage in the 1970s for all lawyers to promote the "new" concept of arbitration and some began to do only arbitration, except it cost a lot more to pay all those lawyers than when a JP did it for nothing.
        The JP system had many problems as would any system, particularly in the urban areas. While the JP system worked well in the country, it did not do so in the urban areas where people were coming and going all their lives and the JPs were called "aldermen." But the change could have been made with skill and care, not by just ditching everything.

Harvard Professors Changed the Country Without Anyone's Knowledge
       Attorney Pawlick still remembers an "old" man who had a baby by his housekeeper after his wife died. He loved the boy very much and treasured the time when the boy would come to see him on weekends. The mother did not want anything to do with the old man and wanted to restrict the visits of the boy although she enjoyed receiving the small support costs that the father (?) paid to her.
       Pawlick was making practically nothing on the case and had taken it only as a favor to an older lawyer. Everyone knew back then that "going to court" was expensive in time and money. Therefore, everyone had a built-in reason to settle their disputes.
       But this was the time when this ended all over America. It was the entrance of the federal "poverty lawyers." They were the creation of President Lyndon Johnson, who also brought us the Vietnam War.
       Up until that time, the representation of poor people had always been done by local lawyers who spent many hours and much effort helping the unfortunate. This was not done by the lawyers who had graduated from Harvard and Yale, because they went to work for large, rich corporate law firms, most of whom had never seen the inside of a courtroom. They welcomed the poverty lawyers who eased their consciences. In addition, some would take a few hours every year and lobby the state government to give more dollars to these poverty lawyers.
       You can find much more about how these poverty lawyers have infiltrated our state by searching our archives for "poverty lawyer."