Due Process Education.

For all the rhetoric praising our profession by our profession, one is compelled to ask, "What of the more than 50 percent of our population who cannot afford a lawyer yet have no idea how to proceed on their own?"

I recently reviewed Kirksey v. Kirksey that all of us studied along with Palsgraf and a number of other cases including Brown v. Kendall and find, in my 74th year of life and 31st year of being a member of The Florida Bar, that these are at their heart nothing more than simple stories about simple people that illustrate simple principles of justice for the most part unknown to the public at large. Shame on us!

The Constitution and teaching the Constitution tells people nothing about due process or what is required to get it in court. It does not explain requests for production, requests for admissions, or interrogatories. It does not explain our age-old principle of "elements of causes of action," or much of anything else other than certain rights that continue to be denied to those who cannot afford a lawyer.

So my question is presented: When are we going to start teaching our public school children the fundamentals of due process and the rule of law, instead of posing as the guardians of democracy as a recent and many previous issues of the News have done? Liberty and justice for all? Not yet.

Self-interest is a dangerous thing, and when the self-interest of our profession (and who will deny it?) disinclines our effort to explain to the public why, for example, Mrs. Palsgraf could not recover from the Long Island Railroad (among the other hundreds of similar entertaining stories that would instill in future generations a genuine veneration for our system of democracy and the justice system that the public seems intent on distrusting), we are not upholding our pledge to the public nor to justice.

If it is correct as recently published in the News that "Our...