Vocabulary notes

Collapse	крах, развал
ailment	болезнь
to dimin­ish	уменьшаться
overbooked	заваленный работой
to predict	предсказывать
plaudits	аплодисменты
from scratch	с самого начала
sheer	полнейший
admonitions	совет, увещевание
to pass the buck	свалить ответственность на кого-либо
dockets	список дел, назначенных к слушанию
hurly-burly	суматоха
charter	устав
to revere	чтить
the Great Society	«Великое общество» - цель демократической партии под руководством президента Линдона Джонсона после выботов 1064г.

Task 3. Read the text again and make sure you know all underlined parts of the text. Give their Russian equivalents

Task 4. Answer the following questions:

1. Who is responsible that the ability of courts has dimin­ished?

2. What are the causes for such great volume of lawsuits?

3. Why has litigation multiplied?

4. When is it possible to predict the law?

5. What are the reasons for the weakening of precedent?

6. What does the author blame the Congress for?

7. And what does he blame the judges for?

Task 5. Agree or disagree with the following statements. Prove your point

1. The courts have taken on more responsibilities at a time when their ability to handle them has increased.

2. The uneasy public has been told to leave legal matters to the amateurs.

3. Now is the time to examine and do something about the serious problems in the legal system.

4. Judges no longer seem to have as much respect for precedent.

5. There now are so many courts and so many decisions that everybody can keep them all straight.

6. Now many judges are confident that practically nothing can be settled in a courtroom.

7. A lawyer can always find occasions to advise a client that a claim is so fanciful no court would entertain it.

Task 6. Ask questions to which the following statements are the answers:

1. Its ailments are not minor.

2. The bar has pocketed its profits and let things slide.

3. The professionals are responsible for five-year trial delays and street criminals turned loose to commit new crimes.

4. No other country has seen such a volume of lawsuits.

5. Congress developed a fondness for enacting broad admonitions in favor of all things good.

6. It’s simply intent to pass the buck.

7. The courts are institutions above the hurly-burly of politics.

8. "Judicial restraint" is the notion that courts had a limited charter.

Task 7. Explain in English what the words and word combinations mean. Use them in your own sentences

The point of collapse, to pocket one’s profits, the bar, to let things slide, state legislatures, to triple, to turn loose, prediction, long-term solution, novel legal doctrines, to keep all straight, to make hard choices, vague laws, broad admoni­tions, to pass the buck, the hurly-burly of politics, judicial restraint, “landmark" decisions

Task 8. Practice the speech patterns given below. Make up two sentences of your own on each pattern

1. That is like trying to solve traffic jams by building more freeways, which just encourages more traffic. Now many judges are confident that practically anything can be settled in a courtroom, which results in overcrowding in courts.She always carries Mace in her handbag, which makes her feel safe. To go to court, you gotta put on a shirt and tie, drag yourself downtown and hang around till the case comes up, which you never know when

2. The bar has pocketed its profits and let things slide. Let us have clean air and water, full employment, full equality and so on. But let’s leave it to the courts to guess what all this means and what to do when one noble goal, written into law, conflicts with another. Only one percent of the pop­ulation are criminals, and we must not let them run our lives.

3. Now judges have become less easy to predict. That criminal is hard to deal with. This court decision is printed in fine print, which makes it very difficult to read.

4. Litigation has multiplied because the law is less predictable than it used to be. It used to be, as Justice Louis Brandeis said, that unlike the other institutions of government, judges were once respected. Justice Holmes used to do a more-than-adequate job in four or five.

5. It is coughing and wheezing and has already turned into something far different from what it was even 20 years ago. The fees were not to be what a poor client would pay a simple lawyer.

Task 9. Make the summary of the text. Use the key words and word combinations

Text 2

Task 1. Answer the questions:

1. In what case would you go to a lawyer?

2. Why is legal profession so popular among school leavers?

3. What does the salary of lawyers depend on?

Task 2. Read the text to get the main idea paying special attention to the underlined parts of the text (key words and word combinations

Over-Lawyered. The swamping of the legal system comes also from too many laws and lawyers. Journalists often rate a Congress by how many new laws it turns out. But more laws mean more lawsuits. The output in last year's session of Congress included more than 400 statutes, filling thousands of pages of fine print. That does not count the swelling of federal regulations, which also generate lawsuits, plus the output of the 30 state legislatures. As government has tried to regulate more aspects of human life, there is more and more to sue about.

Partly because there is so much law business, many of our best and brightest college graduates now go to law school. We have some 700,000 lawyers for a population of 240 million, and 100,000 of them started practicing in the past five years. Most of the lawyers in the world now live in the United States, which has just five percent of the population. In the District of Columbia, one in every 23 men, women and children is a lawyer.

Lawyers like to keep busy, and most are more adept at taking disputes to court than at resolving them quickly and peacefully. They also like to get paid. Law always has been a prosperous profession, but the situation has gotten out of balance. In 1962 the highest-paying law firms in the country started new attorneys at $7200 annually. In 1986 that figure climbed to over $60,000. The big law firms offer high starting salaries because the best lawyers are worth considerably more than the second best; there is little satisfaction in placing No. 2 in a lawsuit. The added costs are simply passed along to the clients.

But lawyers really get overpaid when someone other than the client such as the government — picks up the bill. For example, to encourage lawyers to represent penniless individuals who have been victims of discrimination, Congress passed the Civil Rights Attorneys Fees Awards Act in 1976. It ordered courts to make losing defendants in such cases pay the plaintiff's legal fees, and it set no ceiling on the rates that could be charged.

The courts didn't take long to decide that the law could cover any constitutional right. And the fees were not to be what a poor client would pay a simple lawyer, but rather what a corporation would pay the top partners of the biggest law firms. Such awards can run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

As a result, we have the recent spectacle of a Harvard law professor who, moonlighting out of his office, tried to collect more than $300,000 under this civil-rights law for obtaining a liquor license for a restaurant. It's hard to believe that the restaurant would have been willing to pay that much out of its own pocket.

Lawyers who can benefit from limitless attorney-fee statutes have no reason to economize — the more hours they spend litigating, the more money they collect. Courts allow huge awards because they operate one case at a time and seldom consider who is really paying the large amounts they distribute. (Usually it is either taxpayers or consumers.)