Johnny Cochran has passed away. One of the great lawyers of our time. According to O.J. Simpson, he would not be home if it weren't for Johnny Cochran. Anyone who watched O.J.'s murder trial in 1994 knows that this is true.

Excuse me, but I have a problem with that.

I don't have a problem with Johnny Cochran. He was a brilliant man, who, beyond his work in the O.J. case, represented a lot of very good causes. During his long career, he sat on both sides of the aisle, prosecuting and defending alleged criminals. Outside the criminal field, he also did a lot of civil rights cases.

What I do have a problem with is that who O.J. Simpson's attorney was should have been the least important thing about his trial, not the most important. It should have been about the facts, not who presented them or how much money they had.

The reality of the situation is though that it does matter. How things are phrased, what a defendant is dressed like, his attorney's opening or closing remarks: all of those things have a major impact on the outcome of a trial.

The amount of resources a defendant has to put on a case has a major impact. There was a multiple murder case over a decade ago where the defendant was convicted largely on the basis of his bad teeth, which a number of witnesses used to identify him. A couple of years ago, DNA testing proved that he had not commited the murders, and he was released. You think if this guy had been able to afford to get his teeth fixed before the trial it might have an impact? Instead, every day of that trial these people got to look at his really bad teeth, and that decided the case for them.

The fact is that the court system is a very imperfect method of making decisions about anything. Look at this Schiavo case. It's dragged on for almost a decade and a half. Terry Schiavo's husband got $750,000 for the accident that resulted in her current mental state. He's spent $150,000 of that on medical expenses, and $550,000 in attorney's fees.

Given how imperfect the courts are, one has to has wonder why we are relying on them more and more to make important decisions for us. In 1800s when there was a dispute about the electoral votes in a Presidential election, both sides sat down and came up with a mutually agreed upon system for deciding how to settle the despute. In 2000, in one of the strangest decisions ever, the U.S. Supreme Court made the call. In the tobacco cases, it wasn't just the tobacoo companies that knew that tobacco industry that knew that smoking was bad for you, it was everybody. It was a societal decision to treat smoking tobacco in a certain way. It had to do with economics, societal attitudes about the practice, and a number of different factors. When we took it into the court system, who won the most? The law firms that filed the suits. They got the biggest share of the money.

In New York State, the whole school funding system is being revamped because a single judge has ordered it. If anything ought to be job for legislatures and not courts, it should be how much of the taxpayer's money to spend and where. Instead there is a single man in black robes overruling the legislature, and telling them to spend more money and distribute it differently.

This is what conversative judges on the Supreme Court go on about: not becoming policy makers. Limiting the powers of the court and letting other decision making bodies have the final word. Having been involved in the court system for a number of years very close up, it is something I am very much in agreement with them on.