The Bar Loses--and Public Too

Pete Wilson has won his battle with the State Bar of California. At the end of the day--that day was last Friday--the governor was still standing and the 71-year-old bar, which he’d starved of funds, had laid off more than 400 employees and all but closed its doors in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

For the people of California, Wilson’s victory is a detrimental one indeed. Have a complaint about a lawyer? Need help finding a qualified attorney with specialized knowledge? Your lawyer cashed a settlement check owed you and won’t return your calls? Tough luck, pal.

Wilson picked this fight last October by calling the constitutionally mandated state bar, which regulates and disciplines California’s 122,000 lawyers, a bloated, partisan bureaucracy. He vetoed the bar’s annual dues bill, leaving the organization without funding--last year lawyers paid $458 each in mandatory dues.

In his October veto message, the governor outlined specific areas for change, including a cut in bar dues and limits on lobbying and other activities. The state bar has agreed to legislation that embodies most of those changes. Now Wilson says he wants more, including the ability to appoint nearly all the bar’s governors, positions now largely elected by California’s lawyers. It is not clear how granting the state’s chief executive this extraordinary power would reduce the influence of partisan politics in the regulation of the legal profession.

After a flurry of negotiations intended to avert the bar’s shutdown, talks between the governor’s staff, legislators and representatives of the bar broke off recently. Meanwhile, the public--which lodges more than 100 lawyer complaints each month deemed worthy of investigation by the bar--is without vital consumer protections. Chief Justice Ronald M. George of the California Supreme Court has offered to mediate this deplorable stalemate. The bar has already requested his help; the governor and legislators should do so as well.