According to the Washington State Court of Appeals, truants must be provided with a lawyer from the very beginning of his or her disciplinary hearings or the truant's Constitutional rights are being violated. Assuming that the story's reporter accurately described the court's finding (always risky), a truant's right to an attorney is found in the United States Constitution and therefore cannot be corrected by actions of the legislature. This means that courts have awarded teenagers the same access to lawyers that they have to abortions. And there's nothing that any sensible person can do about either.

At least another judge's ruling that Washington's public high school teachers are free to enjoy sex with their 18-year old students can be repaired. This past week it was decreed that Washington law protects 16 and 17 year old pupils from sexually predatory teachers, but not 18 year olds. It's open season for any teacher who wants to trade an "A" for a roll in the hay. That's a perfect fit for a state in where bestiality was, until recently, perfectly legal.

Naturally, the American Civil Liberties Union hailed the Court of Appeals' ruling. Anything that frays civilization or creates more work for lawyers finds favor in the ACLU.

So where can this end? From this observer's standpoint, limiting legal representation to truancy hearings is quite arbitrary. Now that the camel's nose is well established under the tent flap, legal representation might be required for any sort of disciplinary proceedings. An entire law firm could have been kept busy defending me every time my elementary school teachers made me stand in the corner or marched me off to the principal's office. Detention huh? Talk to my attorney.

We have already had lawsuits against public schools when girls failed to make the cheerleading squad or when a student was not selected as his senior class's valedictorian. Schools have even been sued because the grades earned by a pupil were too low to get him into the school of his choice.

Does anybody see a pattern here? If indeed enforcement of compulsory education is made too cumbersome to be enforced, then it seems that lawyers enjoy the distinction as just about the only professional class that can still force society to employ them. Judges, lawyers all, can dictate from the bench when and where a lawyer must be retained. Even very simple tasks involving real estate transactions, that any remotely literate person could easily manage on his own, must be handled by a lawyer because a judge somewhere said so. It's a bit like granting prostitutes the power to decree that only they are authorized to provide men with sex.

About the only thing close to this is government, which forces people to pay for and accept their services. For example, I would love to have all the money that the federal government has taken out of my paychecks for social security, but they throw people in jail for that. But at least representative government has some sort of accountability. In theory, some sort of debate is conducted and a vote is taken. And we the people could, in theory anyway, vote the bums out. Judges can issue their decrees with little accountability. And to further insulate them from accountability, a few years ago Washington made it illegal to run an independently funded campaign against a Supreme Court justice.

It's not as though other professions wouldn't like to close their shops to outsiders and force consumption of their product. I often get the impression that journalists would like to enforce a monopoly on news dissemination and interpretation.

One solution to this mess would require that public schools surrender their monopoly and permit vouchers. But since unions and their puppets view the primary role of education as the employment of adults rather than the instruction of children, don't hold your breath.