Election will show Wisconsin lawyers support voluntary bar

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The ballots for state bar elections have now arrived. Approximately two-thirds of the state’s attorneys will throw them away, if previous elections provide an accurate forecast of the future. Of those who do vote, a little more than half will vote for one of the bar’s two candidates, and a little less than half will vote for Douglas Kammer, who is running on a one-issue platform: the end of the mandatory bar.

While Mr. Kammer will not receive a majority, I suspect he will get enough votes to win the election.

Of course, Mr. Kammer’s election won’t actually result in a voluntary bar. Only a radical reinterpretation by the U.S. Supreme Court, restoring the constitutional right to freedom of association, can accomplish that.

Nevertheless, the fact that two-thirds of Wisconsin’s attorneys care so little that they don’t bother to vote is telling. It doesn’t require much imagination to conclude that the vast majority of those attorneys are opposed to compulsory membership.

And those non-votes are on top of the nearly half of attorneys who will vote, and will vote for the one-issue candidate. It is clear what rank-and-file attorneys think of the Bar – two-thirds are indifferent, one-sixth are actively hostile.

And yet the Bar goes on, as if it really spoke for the membership. As the young people say, “whatever.” Next year, I imagine someone else will run on a platform of voluntary membership and win again.

And the year after that…. And the year after that…

We still won’t get the voluntary bar we want. But at least we can send an annual message: “You people don’t speak for us.”