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The legal review at glmarshall.com comes close to bigotry in one specific sense -- its targeting of lawyers of every age, race, gender or class. The review shall even define bigotry (unfairly lumping the innocent together with the guilty) and stipulate as too obvious for discussion the fact that the world's richest unemancipated minor, Athina Onassis, has a small army of lawyers pinching away at her multi-billion dollar inheritance.

This issue of the legal review at glmarshall.com believes there is a simple lawyer-bashing beauty that comes as a footnote to the current presidential sex scandal.

Think about this for a moment.

Kathleen Willey, the self-reported victim who did not want to file a claim, went to court to stay out of court.

Went to court to stay out of court.

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The glmarshall.com legal review will cover in coming issues a number of topics, perhaps, most importantly, tobacco. The review believes since the author is allergic to cats, we should ban cats -- and if we can't ban cats, then we should tax them and spend the money on folks suffering from second-hand cat syndrome. No cats in checkout lines. No kittens for little kids. Surely we can all agree on protecting our little kids. We know, we truly know, that higher taxes will cut teen smoking just like $150 Air Jordans cured kids from buying sneakers.

Perhaps it should also be noted that a retrospective of the top ten seniors at the author's high school showed more than half wound up in law. None of the ten makes a living which involves the actual building a tangible object.

And perhaps the review also should admit that the absurdity which began this entire diatribe, the idea of going to court to stay out of court, is actually an exceedingly routine part of this elite system.

Which is why every issue has a space devoted to lawyers.

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Paying attention to the legal news reveals that in a number of places -- Texas among them -- the legal fees in the proposed tobacco settlement have been drawing fire.

The review respectfully suggests the outrage over the $900 breakfasts misses the point. We're accusing them of diddling around with the litterbox when actually we should be accusing them of burning down the house.

The absurd amounts being flung about on tobacco litigation almost necessitates the excess. But the expenses miss the big picture -- it's the total dollar haul, the theory of the one-third-me-fee gone mad -- which deserves our attention.

Here in Richmond, we've seen justice converted into a money-changing machine before -- the three-billion and change paid by A.H. Robins in the Dalkon Shield case. It's not a pretty sight.

A.H. Robins paid dearly to get a level playing field -- what a jury in one city would find for $9,000, another jury in another city would award $9 million on the identical injury. By the time lawyers were finished, a collective billion dollars better off, by the way, dollars were being efficiently doled out by downtown office workers, to each according to his injuries, to each according to his needs -- as long as it fit within the formulas.

The A.H. Robins case is more proof of a legal truism most of us never see until we buy our first house. This unnecessary elite class manages to show up whenever we are moving large values of something, and somehow, we are made to believe we can't do it without them, and that we will pay them for the privilege.

The proposed tobacco settlement would be 100 times larger than A.H. Robins. This boggles my mind after seeing the Dalkon Shield claims resolution corporation wind up providing hundreds of jobs on Main Street Richmond.

Litigation for job creation. There's one for you.

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Now let's get to what really scares the legal review at glmarshall.com. All this money is -- laugh out loud together now here -- supposed to pay health-care costs. Considering most government health care expenditures are made in the last 30 days of life (it's a fact, look it up) most of these victims won't get any money because they will be dead.

By dying early, these victims actually save the government bundles on Social Security. Which means this proposed, and apparently entirely legal, money grab is based on a most dubious premise. Smokers don't cost the government, they save the government money.

Furthermore, for every one of those cancer sticks they sucked down, the government made tax money off their addiction, which, one might think, would make the government just as guilty of whatever exactly it is the government is saying the tobacco companies did wrong. If the government knew it was addictive, why didn't it stop the taxation? What did the government know and when did it know it?

Someone should sue for all back taxes since the '64 Surgeon General's report.

So we could all be bellying up to the bar.