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Maybe there are less lawyers in the General Assembly because certain lawyers (Dave Albo) like to pass certain bills (“abusive driver fees”) that will draw in business to their law firms.

The Virginia Bar president’s argument for more lawyers in the legislature is ironic, wrong, and contrary to recent history.

It’s lawyers who are responsible for much of the botched legislation in the Virginia General Assembly.

It was a senior lawyer/legislator from Tidewater, Virginia who was responsible for the most famous legislative drafting error in Virginia history — the failed rewrite of Virginia’s blue laws that so botched the law (potentially costing businesses millions) that then-Governor Mark Warner had to call the legislature back into special session to fix it, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars to taxpayers.

The state senator responsible for that botched legislation intended to achieve the exact opposite of what his bill actually achieved, thanks to lousy drafting.

The large number of lawyer/legislators in Virginia may be one reason its courts do more to promote divorce than most surrounding states: that creates more work for divorce lawyers, including the divorce lawyers who sit in the General Assembly. (Most Virginia judges are picked by the legislature; Governors only make recess appointments).

That may be why Virginia courts do things that are economically inefficient and unfair, like awarding permanent alimony based on even very short marriages (Bristow v. Bristow (1980)), then constantly allowing the alimony levels to be reset based on upward changes on the paying spouses income (see Conway v. Conway (1990)), but not downward changes (see Antonelli v. Antonelli (1991)), and allowing child and spousal support levels to be set based not on what the paying spouse actually makes (which would be an easy mechanical calculation that would not enrich lawyers), but rather on higher, hypothetical (and sometimes arbitrary) estimates of what the paying spouse could make, or once made (“imputed income”), as in the cases of Cochran v. Cochran (1992), and Antonelli v. Antonelli (1991).

Setting support levels based on hypothetical rather than actual income results in lots of argument between opposing lawyers, generating work for lawyers at the expense of the paying spouse.

I believe that Virginia’s divorce laws are an impediment to small business creation by divorced people.

I believe that the Chamber of Commerce should take that into account in its next rating of Virginia’s legal system.

As prominent divorce lawyer Richard Crouch notes, Virginia courts employ a “heads-I-win, tails-you-lose” approach to people who try to start small businesses.

If you leave a steady job to try to set up a small business, and it succeeds, you will have your alimony and child support payments increased over their prior levels (See Conway v. Conway (1990)).

But if the business fails (as most small businesses do), resulting in your income falling below its prior levels, the courts will force you to pay alimony and child support as if you were still making the higher income you made at your prior job. (See Antonelli v. Antonelli (1991)).

I am, in case you are wondering, happily married, never divorced, and have no children with anyone other than my wife.

I do, however, have economics and law degrees (from Harvard and the University of Virginia)).

For further discussion of this topic, see the following articles available on the web (1) Richard Crouch’s “Support Obligations in Mean Times: The Virginia Courts and the Recession” (1992); and (2) “The Economics of Divorce,” my lengthy Dec. 4, 2007 post at OpenMarket, which explains how faulty economics and legal ignorance is behind the misguided push to increase child support guidelines in states like Virginia.

I second Tim Watson’s comments about albo (and I’m in his district…). He ran unopposed in the last election, but I still wrote in “None of the Above.”

Hans – you aren’t kidding about VA divorce courts. I had a friend lose a chunk of his military retirement, lost custody of the kids, forced into alimony and child support, but it was her who cheated on him and filed the papers. He was blindsided and to add insult to injury, the adultery was inadmissible…

And lets not forget how shabbily VA treated Federal and Military retirees by ripping them off for hundreds of millions of dollars in income tax when state retirees paid zip on their retirements. And then when they were finally forced to fess up, they pleaded that the money was all spent. That did not work, so they paid it back over 4 years with no interest and back-end loaded in the cynical hope that the taxpayer would die before then…

Dave Albo compares favorably to most other lawyer/legislators in Virginia, especially those in the state senate.

Bad legislation wizzes through the Virginia state senate almost as soon as it is proposed, contrary to everything people were taught in civics about deliberation in the legislative process.

There’s scarcely any opportunity for citizens to even show up and explain why the legislation is bad before it passes.

Much of the bad legislation then gets killed (or at least modified) by Dave Albo and his colleagues in the other house of Virginia’s legislature, the House of Delegates.

If Virginia’s delegates were to pay closer attention to what comes out of the state senate, rather than deferring to their senate colleagues, then fiascos like the one I discussed above (involving the botched rewrite of Virginia’s blue laws) would not happen.

“fearing that they will instead advance the interest of organized factions, perhaps including the self-interest of the legal profession itself.”

YA Think?

I hope all voters will send attorney/legislators back to their practices.

Here’s another example of bad policy out of Richmond – exempting hybrid vehicles from HOV restrictions, especially the HOV 3 lanes on I-395.

They allowed 3 single driver hybrids to replace one vehicle with three occupants thus causing more congestion, three times the road wear and tear, and pollute more than a vehicle with three occupants.

Single driver hybrids do not save any fuel and actually use more fuel. Keeping it simple, for a 50 mile trip, spot the hybrids 50 mpg (most do not get that). three hybrids will then use 3 gallons. A car with 3 occupants would have to get 16.67 mpg to equal the fuel wasted by three single occupant hybrids. My vehicle gets 38 mpg and I usually take 4 people, so my fuel consumption is .33 gallons per occupant – THREE times less than a single occupant hybrid.

So, to recap – hybrids in the HOVs pollute more, cause more congestion and use more fuel. And to add insult to injury, VA decided to help these people buy their vehicles by giving them a $2000 tax credit. Idiots…

And the HOT lanes are just as stupid an idea because they do not have the technology to make it work. They have no way to distinguish a person paying for the HOT lane and a car/slug pool. They cannot distinguish my car’s EZ-PASS transponder from any other car. That means even though I have 2 or 3 slugs, I will still get charged. Forcing me to register as a carpool is out of the question and would destroy slugging as we know it in Northern VA. Which is sad because slugging is one thing that works without government intervention.

VA claims that they will use a British technology that uses infrared to count bodies inside a car. But, that system is only 90% accurate. If a person with three occupants in their car has to go through 10 checkpoints, there is a 65% chance that they will be falsely identified as a HOT lane user one or more times. Assuming 40 trips a month (2 per day for 20 work days)that means they will be nailed 26 times on average. What a joke.

This is the same legislature, mind you, lawyers and all, that provided a non-elected body to levy taxes and fees, likely in violation of state law.

The legal costs on that one will be immense, further enriching the lawyers, and the “restitution” minuscule.