This Is So Obvious, It Should Never Have Even Been in the Law

It shouldn’t have been legislated into Bankruptcy “Reform” at all:

Judge rules against 2005 bankruptcy law
Restrictions on lawyers’ advice, ads cited
December 9, 2006

A portion of the new U.S. bankruptcy law unfairly restricts attorneys and violates the First Amendment, a U.S. District Court judge in Minneapolis ruled this week.

Ruling in a lawsuit that challenges the bankruptcy law’s provisions, Judge James Rosenbaum noted that part of the law “forbids truthful and possibly efficacious advice” from an attorney to a client. “If this is the government’s view of legal ethics, it is a form of ethics unfamiliar to the Court.”

….. Specifically, Rosenbaum’s ruling addressed a provision in the 2005 law that says attorneys can’t advise their clients to take on more debt as the clients consider filing for bankruptcy. The law also dictates what attorney advertisements must say, and Rosenbaum noted that such regulation is done at the state level. He said the provisions would be unconstitutional if applied to attorneys.

The next step in the case is now up to the U.S. Department of Justice. Officials with the department couldn’t be reached for comment Friday.

“I think it will go up through the appeals process,” said Larry Ponoroff, dean of the law school at Tulane University in New Orleans.

I don’t see why. It’s such an obvious restriction on free speech (and free commercial speech, which has as much right to be heard as political speech) that the DOJ should just give it up.