Broader submission version
Lawyers Should Not Run All Three Branches
Family courts reveal what happens when the profession that profits from complexity governs the people trapped inside it.
By Justin A. Tahai

There is a quiet conflict of interest at the heart of American government: the people who profit most from complexity are too often the same people entrusted with writing, interpreting, administering, and defending that complexity.
Lawyers already have a branch of government built for their training. It is called the judiciary.
They speak its language. They control its rituals. They decide what counts as a fact, what counts as evidence, what counts as timely, what counts as preserved, and what human suffering must be ignored because it arrived in the wrong format, on the wrong form, before the wrong clerk, under the wrong caption, or without the right procedural phrase.
That is already enormous power.
But when lawyers also dominate legislatures and executive offices, the whole government begins to think like a courtroom. Reality becomes secondary to procedure. Truth becomes something performed, not discovered. Harm becomes something translated into pleadings, objections, motions, continuances, and appeals until the people living through it are exhausted beyond recognition.
The public is told this is justice.
It is not justice. It is an antiquated game of supposed truth.
Family matters expose the failure most clearly. In family court, delay is not neutral. Delay is a parenting schedule. Delay is a child growing older. Delay is a month without contact, a semester of school instability, a missed therapy opportunity, a medical record not shared, a holiday lost, or a relationship weakened while everyone waits for the next proper procedural step.
A parent can lose months with a child while everyone waits for a hearing. A poor person can lose meaningful appellate review because the record costs too much to obtain. A clerk can reject an urgent filing because the technical form is wrong. A child can learn that one parent is absent, unavailable, or unsafe while adults debate whether the correct motion is pending in the correct forum.
Lawyers call this the system. Families call it their life.
The problem is not that every lawyer is corrupt or cruel. Many are not. The problem is that legal training is adversarial by design. It teaches people to win arguments within rules, not to solve human problems at the speed harm occurs. It rewards narrowing, objecting, delaying, reframing, preserving advantage, and turning pain into a record that can later be argued over.
That mentality is dangerous enough in court. It is disastrous when it becomes the operating philosophy of democracy.
Legislatures should be filled with builders, nurses, teachers, parents, engineers, tradespeople, farmers, technologists, caregivers, small-business owners, and ordinary citizens who understand systems by living under them, not merely by drafting language around them. Executive offices should be led by people who know how to implement, repair, coordinate, and deliver results, not people whose highest professional skill is explaining why nothing can be done until another procedural condition is satisfied.
A government dominated by lawyers does not see a broken family-court process. It sees a docket. It does not see a child waiting for contact with a parent. It sees a pending motion. It does not see poverty blocking access to appeal. It sees transcript procedure. It does not see school instability, medical-access problems, or years of compounding delay. It sees issues to be raised in the proper forum, at the proper time, under the proper rule.
And when the harm becomes undeniable, the answer is almost always the same: file something else.
That answer protects the institution. It does not protect the people.
The legal profession has convinced the public that because lawyers understand law, they are uniquely qualified to govern. That assumption deserves to be challenged. Understanding the maze is not the same as knowing whether the maze should exist. Mastering procedural combat is not the same as public leadership. Knowing how to argue both sides of a question is not the same as having moral clarity.
In fact, the habits of legal training can become a liability in public office. Lawyers are trained to hedge. Citizens need courage. Lawyers are trained to preserve options. Families need decisions. Lawyers are trained to identify risk. Communities need action. Lawyers are trained to make language defensible. People need language to be understandable.
The result is a government that often sounds lawful while behaving indecently.
No democracy should be run as a guild project by one profession. No profession should be allowed to staff the judiciary, dominate the legislature, occupy the executive branch, write the rules, interpret the rules, profit from the rules, and then tell the public that the rules themselves are neutral.
They are not neutral when only insiders can navigate them. They are not neutral when delay benefits the party with more money. They are not neutral when truth depends less on what happened than on who can package it properly. They are not neutral when children, parents, tenants, workers, defendants, patients, and the poor are told that their suffering is procedurally premature.
Process matters, but process is not sacred. Courts matter, but courts are not temples. Lawyers matter, but lawyers are not priests.
The law should serve human beings. Human beings should not be sacrificed to the law's performance of itself.
Perhaps it is time for a harder separation of professional power. Lawyers may serve in the judiciary, where their training belongs, but voters should be deeply wary of allowing the same profession to dominate the branches responsible for democratic imagination and practical administration. At minimum, legal credentials should not be treated as automatic qualifications for office. They should be treated as a warning label: this person may know how to manage the game, but do they know how to end unnecessary games?
The country does not need more leaders who can turn suffering into paperwork. It needs leaders who can look at a broken process, especially in family matters, and say plainly: this is harming people, and we are going to stop it.