Um, reading is needed to be a lawyer?
Then i guess we shouldn’t have blind lawyers, eh?
Or maybe we need to recognize that there are other ways to take in information besides reading. Such as being read to by others. And with the growth of speech recognition and text-to-voice conversion, the inability to read or write by sight is becoming increasingly irrelevant.
I have a friend with a full body disability, literally can’t even turn the pages of a book without help. He told me once that by his math he would have to make $80,000 year to pay for his staff of helpers. Given that he was accepted into Harvard Law School, he had a real shot at pulling that off.
And he can pull that off, who is the bar association to say he can’t be a lawyer?
I have been pretty harsh on Sotomayor, and i do think her nomination should be withdrawn. but she made exactly the right call, here. And, bluntly, i take a dim view of the idea of allowing an organization to decide whether you can practice in your chosen field because of what it estimates that you can do. i would rather say to the Bartletts of the world, “let’s let the market decide if you have any business being a lawyer.”
