Posted by
NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Tuesday, August 22, 2006 11:21:50 AM
The reader will discover that one of the more interesting things about the legal system in Colorado, and probably most states, is that while a citizen cannot sue a judge for misconduct, a judge can sue a citizen for reporting, writing, or talking about misconduct.
The same is true for an attorney. I can't sue an attorney for an ethics violation, but he can sue me for reporting, writing, or talking about it.
The lawsuit doesn't even to have merit. Its purpose is to use the parasitic aspect of the legal system to bleed or threaten to bleed to death a person who speaks out. It happens so often that lawyers have given it a name: "Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation," or SLAPP. To my knowledge, no attorney has ever been disbarred for filing a SLAPP lawsuit, though filing a meritless lawsuit is clearly a legal ethics violation.
I am trying to avoid a SLAPP lawsuit, so some definitions are in order. This post will be edited from time to time as I think to do it.
Ethics. There are two kinds of ethics: Moral ethics and legal ethics. They are not the same.
The definition of legal ethics is controlled by the state supreme court. It might appear to be intended to protect the public, but it is not. It is entirely possible, even probable that an issue that I discuss will be ethically immoral in the common sense of the word, but legally ethical.
Unless I specify that I am writing about "legal ethics," I intend to use the word "ethics" in its commonly accepted definition.
For example, I consider the state supreme court in Colorado to have a number of unethical members who feel free to make unethical decisions outside the constraints of the law and constitution, their recent single subject ruling being a prime example. If I did not specify that I wasn't writing about legal ethics, but moral ethics, they might be able to sustain a SLAPP lawsuit against me, if only because they have the power to define for themselves what is legally ethical conduct.
Fair warning to a lawyer who contemplates a SLAPP lawsuit against me is that I will fight back publicly and privately.