Was Cutting the Cord, Getting rid of the monkey

Ivan Avery Frey ivan.avery.frey-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Sat Apr 27 22:56:29 UTC 2013


On 25/04/13 09:22 PM, Christopher Browne wrote:
> More simply, the people doing the work to prepare the legal filings
> reasonably expect to be paid for the work they are doing.
>
> There's certainly a Catch-22 here, and a troublesome one (albeit
> arguably less bad than the original Catch-22 wherein the participants
> risked getting killed; they were in the throes of WWII, after all.)
>
> Filing for bankruptcy requires preparing and filing some set of legal
> documents, and if you haven't the money (which is kind of likely, under
> the circumstances where you're keen on doing so), it may not be possible
> to do so.
>
> Those of us on this mailing list are presumably reasonably literate (as
> we have the habit of reading and writing), which means we could all
> imagine preparing those filings ourselves, assuming they aren't too
> opaque or counterintuitive.  To folks that aren't literate, there's a
> big extra dose of scary there.
>
> The fees aren't obvious as something the government ought to cover.  (At
> another end of the spectrum, I could see an article in the Sun yapping
> about that, to the effect that "Those crazy lefties want to add insult
> to injury by having Us Responsible Tax Paying People pay for their
> foolishness that led to their bankruptcy.  And bankruptcy?  We're just
> paying those lefties' bills!!!"  The Sun is *so* strange...)  It's not
> obvious to me that the government should pay to perform such filings;
> it's not self-evident that any of the levels of government ought to be
> properly considered responsible.  But at leaves a strange looking gap,
> because someone who has had their assets seized to cover debts is
> vanishingly unlikely to have terribly much left over.  Indeed, the
> reason to declare bankruptcy is that one's debts considerably exceed
> one's assets; otherwise, it's not worth the trouble.
>
> Giving the law firm first dibs on any of the last bits of assets is
> probably necessary in order for such a system to work, but seems rather
> strange from a fairness perspective; it makes them look pretty vulture-like.
>
> What I *imagine* is better is for this to be the sort of work that a
> general purpose law office would do pro-bono, though the tendency to
> specialize leads towards this getting dropped out, and pressed into the
> place where it is actually seen, namely with firms specializing in it,
> which means it *cannot* be done pro-bono, as those people need to eat,
> and it's not at all reasonable for their office to have no source of income.

There is legal aid.

Ivan.
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