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Nader engages law school audience
Ralph Nader signs books for those attending his lecture in the UB Law School.
Ralph Nader, the legendary consumer activist and four-time presidential candidate, wasted no time in engaging the overcapacity crowd attending the talk he gave Nov. 14 on "Corporate Power, Law Firms and Law Schools" at the UB Law School.
He began by talking about the bane of every law student: the debt that they’ll carry when they graduated, noting that that kind of debt burden would restrict their ability to take risks.
“How many of you would go into public interest law if the salary were $140,000? Hands,” he asked.
Quickly, hands went up.
“Keep them up,” he said. “Now what if it paid $100,000?” A few hands went down. “Eighty? Sixty?” More hands go down.
“See how reality sets in?” he asked.
During the 90-minute talk, Nader turned deftly from the subject of law school debt and personal idealism to the rogue idea that corporations can have the same rights as people, the current administration, the Iraq war, the U.S. Treasury response to the financial mess and the problems of U.S. automakers. He repeatedly drew connections between what was happening in society and the responsibility of law students to become engaged in it.
“Times change, right?” he said. “Who changes them? Mostly people your age.”
He told the law students that the debt they were incurring to pay for their education would affect their career choices.
“You want to bring your conscience to work every day,” he said. “The problem is, your profession trivializes your talents and pays you handsomely for it.”
He described the struggle law students feel between wanting to pursue a meaningful career and do something for the public good, while feeling tempted by the lucrative offers of the big law firms. It wasn’t a pretty picture.
“You’ll say, ‘I’ll do it for five yrs and I’ll get out.’ But by then you’ll have a mortgage, so you’ll say ‘I’ll do it for four more years,’ but by then you’ll have become partner. Before you know it, you’re being pushed out by 45-year-olds because you’re not a rainmaker anymore.”
He said that corporate lawyers begin to develop what he called ‘retainer astigmatism,’ where lawyers justify anything their client wants them to do on the grounds that everybody deserves zealous representation.
“I beg to differ,” said Nader. “Corporations shouldn’t be afforded the same rights as human beings.”
Corporations have been using this as a defense for decades, he explained, when in fact, the judge in the 1886 case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad did not rule that the railroad had the same rights as a person. Nader said it was written into the decision by the scribe who wrote up the case and who just happened to be a former railroad company attorney.
“It was a totally rogue decision,” declared Nader, noting that these issues are worthy of fresh debate on law school campuses.
Debate also has been absent on the most important issues of the day, he said, specifically those stemming from the invasion of Iraq and other instances of the “chronic institutional illegality as expressed primarily by the two recidivist criminals in the White House.”
He mentioned that a Washington Post story last week described a recent, barely noticed change in the tax law that produced a $140 billion windfall for U.S. banks. The story, he said, quoted tax experts who said the tax change was illegal.
“Nobody gets excited about this anymore,” he said.
And this chronic illegality will not change with the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama, he said.
He also attacked the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, which he said, was “issued by fiat, with no public hearings…no guidelines, no criteria…It’s anarchical.”
On the proposal to bail out the auto industry, Nader said letting the carmakers go under would destroy entire communities across the nation. He then proposed that a bailout be conditioned upon the immediate removal of the executives who “ran these corporations into the ground,” the assurance that taxpayers will be repaid the way they were when Lee Iacocca resurrected Chrysler after President Carter’s bailout and the requirement that companies focus on emission control and fuel efficiency.
In spite of, or because of, his fierce criticisms, Nader managed to inspire more than a few of the students in attendance.
One asked Nader to discuss how he ended up following his own ideals when he was a student at Harvard Law School.
Nader responded that it was the loss of so many of his friends and acquaintances in car accidents that inspired him to investigate unsafe auto design and legal liability. He said students would come back to school after spring break and find out that one or two of their classmates had been killed.
So, for his third-year law school paper, he began gathering data on car accidents from the Harvard School of Public Health and from MIT. The paper turned into his first book published in 1965, “Unsafe at Any Speed,” which led to dramatic changes in auto design, starting with the seat belt.
“You want to make yourself vulnerable to injustice,” he said. “Don’t let your talents be trivialized. Have a much higher estimate of your own significance. There is something deep inside of us that yearns to advance justice. You wouldn’t go to law school if you didn’t have it.”
That yearning has led Nader to pursue the presidency unsuccessfully four times; during the recent 2008 election, he received approximately 700,000 votes.
Nader was a guest of the UB Law School Student Bar Association.
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