I Bought the Law, Now the Law’s Mine

When the Rich can weaponize the law by shopping around for judges and bringing frivolous lawsuits to bankrupt opponents, Justice is just for sale.

Let’s get something straight off the top: justice in America isn’t blind, it’s got a market price. That price is determined by billionaires like Donald trump, who figured out a long time ago that you don’t need to win in court to win the war. You just need to financially bleed your enemies dry, and the rich have a Weapon of Mass Disruption to use against anyone and everyone that gets in their way.

The WMD the rich are fighting this modern day Class War with is: the perpetual lawsuit. The infinite legal loop. The scorched-earth strategy where oligarchs transform the courts from a place to prove innocence or pursue truth, into a financial battlefield where they outlast their enemies into submission by sheer financial ability. They traded any thought of blood or bullets for dollars and cents, and the rich have been exerting their influence over the entire Republican Party and enough of the Democrats that now they can take the fight directly to We the People.

But trump is just a prototype of this tactic. He’s not a brilliant tactician, he’s just another spoiled brat with a legal trust fund. He loses lawsuits like most of us lose socks, and he loves it, because it’s not about the verdict, it’s about the volume. He can file a dozen cases in a month, lose most if not all of them, and the cost to him is a rounding error financially, and even less personally, because someone else shows up to court for him. But the people he targets? Journalists, whistleblowers, ex-employees, political opponents, they don’t have that kind of cash, or time. Most of them can’t afford to fight onefrivolous lawsuit, let alone ten. And this administration has gone further than any other before, directly attacking entire media companies and law firms.

So what happens? They settle. They drop their own, legitimate suits. They shut up. They disappear.

And the rest of us get the message: Speak up, and you might end up spending the next five years and three hundred grand defending yourself from a billionaire’s tantrums in a courtroom, and you’ll have nothing to show for it, if you ever show up again.

This is not a bug in our legal system; it’s a feature, custom-built by and for people who can afford to pay someone six figures to bend the law just far enough to make their so called “abuse” legal. Theyhave teams of lawyers, so you can bet you’ll get a counter suit. You have debt, and they know it. Oh, and that bent law? It never bends for you, that costs money.

As long as lawyers are trained to game the law and then turn around and sell that knowledge to the wealthiest clients, we’re never going to see real justice in this country. Practicing law will never be about justice or the truth, it will only ever be about using the law against itself to win. And let’s face it, when the bar is set to “beyond a reasonable doubt”, all you have to do as a lawyer is create that doubt, and you win.

So let me propose something radical: Let’s nationalize the damn law.

I’m talking about a universal public legal system, where lawyers work not for partners or profit margins, fame or fortune, but for the people. And if we’re going to let private practice persist at all, we need a massive structural overhaul to take the teeth out of lawsuit warfare.

Here’s one idea: every court case in the United States should be tied to a public legal fund. Both sides agree to pull from the same monetary pool, and the winner gets the bulk of it, yes, but the losing lawyer still gets paid well. Enough to keep the lights on. Enough to survive. Enough to keep working on a win.

Why? Because if lawyers only eat when they win, then rich clients will just shop around for legal sharks who lie, cheat, and bury their opponents in paperwork just to secure a payday. But if losing still pays enough to keep a practice afloat, you incentivize balance, not bloodsport. You create a system where the goal is not to outspend your enemy, but to argue the damn truth, and nothing but it.

Let’s not forget: this system didn’t evolve by accident. It was forged, case by case, by the very predators it now protects, and some of the most insane examples come from the top.

You remember Bill Clinton’s infamous dodge during the Republican’s obsession with a blowjob scandal? “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” That wasn’t just linguistic gymnastics, that was a team of elite lawyers building a semantic escape hatch in real time. A legal fortress built out of air quotes and billable hours. He wasn’t trying to be clever; he was trying not to be prosecuted. And it worked.

Then there’s the gold standard of courtroom corruption: Jeffrey Epstein. The man ran a sex trafficking operation with the efficiency of a hedge fund and walked away in 2008 with a non-prosecution deal so airtight it protected not just him, but unnamed co-conspirators. You know what that is? That’s not justice looking the other way. That’s justice handing you the keys to the back door and tipping its cap on the way out.

And then of course there’s Donald trump, the first man in history to claim “total exoneration” from a report that literally predicted his lie, and said “This report does not exonerate him.” The Mueller Report laid out ten counts of obstruction of justice so clearly a fifth grader could connect the dots, but thanks to a Department of Justice policy that said a sitting president couldn’t be indicted, Mueller punted, trump pounced, Republicans covered their eyes, Democrats fumbled, and America lost. He turned legal restraint into propaganda, weaponizing the absence of charges into a spear of innocence and a major win. That wasn’t the system holding him accountable. That was the system shutting its mouth and handing him the mic. And you better believe every future tyrant took notes.

These weren’t rogue moments. These were system-sanctioned get out of jail free cards, printed by legal teams whose job wasn’t to argue innocence, but to bully the law into paralysis. Courts that let billionaire predators say, in effect, “Try to touch me, see what happens to your career.” And judges and prosecutors, intimidated or bought, who chose silence over confrontation every, Damn. Time.

Justice wasn’t blind. She was blinking in Morse code, signaling escape routes for the powerful while many of us rot in holding cells for stealing food and selling plants. You shouldn’t have to risk bankruptcy to hold the rich accountable, or to prove your innocence from their retaliation. That’s not justice, that’s extortion with a gavel.

It’s pretty simple. If we want justice to be blind, we have to strip it of dollar signs. That means no more billionaire lawsuits used as WMD’s. No more legal strategies designed to drag out proceedings until the other side taps out. No more courtroom circuses where the only thing really on trial is whether you can afford your lawyer for the entire duration of the lawsuit.

Look, trump may be the loudest abuser of this system, but he’s not alone. Every oligarch in this country knows how to exploit the courts, and if we don’t take away the tools they use to abuse, then we’ll be doomed to suffer in perpetuity.