Doug Johnson is an airline pilot. He wasn't born an airline pilot, he was born a fighter pilot. But all humans endure a natural progression, and there came a time when the powers that be assigned him to a big mahogany desk to be the Air Wing Safety Officer. It was a very nice desk, but it didn't manuever very well. So reluctantly Doug went out to vend his talent to another buyer and became an airline pilot. That sufficed for twenty years, but the government found out that airline pilots were better compensated than congressmen, and even senators, and DEREGULATED.

So Doug became a lawyer.

Law is an honorable profession. Lately there have been some who have not been upholding that honor quite as well as they maybe should, but on the whole law is honorable. Lawyers work for other people: in fact, in some circles they are called hired guns which makes it an ideal profession for a former fighter pilot. Sometimes the people the lawyers work for are not that nice, and sometimes the lawyers do not nice things to please their clients. But on the whole law is an honorable profession.

Doug has been mucking about in the law since he went to Naval Justice School in 1964. Military Law is almost totally criminal law, but it has some really interesting issues. For instance, is a married Marine who is discharged, marries someone else without benefit of a divorce from number one, and then rejoins the Marine Corps, guilty of bigamy under the Uniform Code of Military Justice? Bigamy comes under the "Conduct Unbecoming" catchall, but does the Marine Corps have jurisdiction? I'll leave that for you.

Since 1988 Doug has been in the law field in the civilian sector. Another airline pilot/Naval Aviator, A. Jay Cristol, Chief Bankruptcy Judge Emeritus of the Southern District of Florida, took him in as a law clerk and taught him bankruptcy law between 1988 and 1991. Bankruptcy is a strange discipline. Many commercial litigators want nothing to do with it, but it is the acid test of commercial law. Bankruptcy is code law in a common law environment. Further, it is code law against the common law, which holds that subjects pay their debts or go to prison. That offended the founding fathers, so bankruptcy is memorialized in the United States Consititution. Having it so memorialized offends some creditors, so there is a constant tension in bankruptcy lawmaking, depending upon whose star is currently in ascension. That makes for some dichotomies: for instance, in Florida, you can exempt a 15 million dollar homestead, but you better not have over a thousand dollars worth of furniture in it. A foreign national who lives in Florida can keep his work tools, but a citizen who lives in Florida better not have more than a thousand dollars worth of tools and furniture, or they become forfeit. And the list goes on. Having it so complex is really good for lawyers: almost no one can do their own bankruptcy well; sort of like giving yourself a root canal.

If you are interested in what other kinds of law I do CLICK HERE.