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THE DARK SIDE: Divorced lawyers are a very powerful lobby group

By: David Ziemer, [email protected]//July 26, 2011//

THE DARK SIDE: Divorced lawyers are a very powerful lobby group

By: David Ziemer, [email protected]//July 26, 2011//

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David Ziemer

The first thing attorneys learn in law school is not really a legal principle, but rather a historical fact: back in the day, railroads were really important.

All the early foundational cases dating to the Progressive era seem to involve trains in one way or another.

• The seminal case discussing duty as an element in negligence cases is Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co., 162 N.E. 99 (N.Y. 1928).

• The seminal case holding that there is no federal common law in diversity cases is Erie Railroad v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64 (1938).

• The infamous equal protection case, Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), involved segregated trains, not segregated schools, which were at issue many years later in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

In short, the history lesson quickly learned in law school is that, in the olden days, rail was the cornerstone of interstate commerce.

But for some reason, modern day Progressives don’t want to progress forward, but want to regress back to those “good old days” before people had cars, regardless of how much damage trains to nowhere do to the economy.

In my opinion, if some baby boomer wants to go on a nostalgia kick, he should pull out his old Donovan LPs and smoke some banana peels. But no, they want to go back much further than that.

But there is one rail project that even the most progressive Progressives recognize as folly: the $64 million streetcar to take people from the north end of downtown Milwaukee to the south end (which the Milwaukee Common Council approved Tuesday).

However, one group of people will actually benefit from the project: divorced, middle-aged attorneys.

Let me explain.

For a decade or so, I lived north of downtown where the proposed route begins, and worked in the south of downtown. Had the streetcar been around back then, I could have ridden it to work instead of having to walk a whole 1.5 miles each way every day.

The demographics of my old neighborhood consist of three core groups: eccentric old women who live with lots of cats; young people living independently for the first time; and divorced, middle-aged attorneys.

The attorneys used to live in the suburbs and worked 60 hour weeks, thinking they were building a nice life for their families. Then, one day, they got served divorce papers because they were always working and never at home.

Now, they have huge mortgage payments and confiscatory property taxes to pay on houses they are not allowed to live in. So, the only place they can afford to live is with the twenty-somethings and the cat ladies near the north end of the street car line.

The cat ladies won’t use the streetcar, though, as there are no cat food stores on the route. The young people won’t use it either, because they can ride their bicycles to their chosen destinations for free and get there faster, too.

So, that leaves only the divorced attorneys to ride the streetcar to work.

Frankly, I had no idea that the divorced middle-aged attorney lobby was so powerful. On the contrary, given that these guys only get to see their kids a few times per year, I would have guessed they were a rather oppressed lot.

But, as the saying goes, “Follow the money.”

If divorced middle-aged attorneys are the only ones who will benefit from this $64 million boondoggle, then they must be the ones behind it.

In my opinion, if lonely lawyers are feeling all nostalgic for their law school days, they should just pour themselves a glass of wine and reread the opinions in Palsgraf. They shouldn’t make the rest of us buy a toy choo choo train that no one will ride but them.

(Map courtesy of themilwaukeestreetcar.com)

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