Vote on Mandatory Membership in State Bar

* I am a lawyer who voted against mandatory membership in the state bar in the recent plebiscite (May 24). Here’s why.

Each lawyer must pay almost $500 per year in dues, the highest in the nation. The bulk (70%) of that money goes to disciplining the organization’s own lawyers. Yet we already have legal malpractice remedies available to the public through the courts and contingency fee lawyers. Further, the bar requires lawyers to take 12 hours per year in unnecessary traffic school-type education classes.

All other bar associations at the national, county and city level are voluntary. Creating a coerced monopoly has had the expected consequences: conceited and disinterested bureaucrats, wasteful expenditures, needless regulations, and an organization that does not help its members but oppresses them.

JOSHUA T. HEARD

Los Angeles

* I was dismayed by the way state bar president James Towery and Los Angeles County bar president Laurie Zelon (Commentary, May 30) sought to distance the state bar from the Judicial Nominees Evaluation (JNE) Commission.

I was a member of the JNE Commission for three years. The JNE Commission is the most hard-working, conscientious bar group I have ever been affiliated with. To suggest that the commission’s unqualified rating of Justice Janice Rogers Brown was the result of gender, racial or anti-conservative bias is way off the mark.

I would have expected our bar leaders to point out that the majority of commission members are women; that the chair is a woman, and that the commission is racially and ethnically diverse.

Although confidentiality precludes a review of the political leanings of the persons evaluated by JNE, we know that with the exception of Justice Brown, since JNE was established in 1979, no one rated “not qualified” has been appointed to a judicial position.

PETER M. APPLETON

Los Angeles

* The article by Towery and Zelon should have been published in the comics. They state: “Its system for disciplining lawyers is a model for the nation.” In 1982, due to a real estate deal, an Orange County attorney, whom we never met or talked to and whom we never authorized, initiated a lawsuit in our name against a mortgage holder. Furthermore, he entered into a stipulation imposing a heavy financial obligation on us.

Shocked by the threatening financial disaster I went to the courthouse to investigate this scoundrel’s authority to act in our name. I was appalled by the discovery, on the verification by party document, that the distinguished member of the bar forged my signature.

I filed charges against the lawyer with the bar. The bar disposed the case in secrecy with a “private reproval.” It proves the “efficiency, effectiveness and reliability of its discipline system.” What hypocrisy!

STEPHEN KOVACS

Seal Beach