Were American lawyers ever required to know the Bible and if so which states I heard this mentioned somewhere. Have also seen laws in some of the colonies that were almost verbatim taken from the Bible, however I can't find any mention of a particular state requiring (or even just highly encouraged) someone aspiring to practice law to know the Bible?
This is unlikely. Knowledge of the Bible was commonplace among literate people in the early U.S., and literacy rates in New England and the Mid-Atlantic States (and the colonies that preceded them, and later on in the Midwest) were among the highest in the world - with literacy being reserved for the merchant and higher classes in many parts of the &quot;Old World&quot;. Literacy was much less widespread, however, in the American South or Appalachia, which were also among the most secular parts of the United States prior to the Second Great Awakening around the 1830s to 1840s, when the American South transformed itself into the most religious part of the United States. Particularly in areas were literacy was lower, litigation was much more common than it is now over matters which we would consider petty, but most legal proceedings were similar to modern, lawyerless small claims court (and courts often ventured into activities that we would no longer consider to be legal as opposed to governmental administrative matters today like road improvements and welfare payments). The privilege of representing someone else in legal proceedings was vested in individual courts or judges but granted liberally, to pretty much anyone who was literate and had some familiarity with legal texts. The legal profession only began to be formally regulated as such in the late 1800s with the first law schools providing a significant share of the bar starting around the 1870s (before which most lawyers started out &quot;reading law&quot; as an apprentice in another lawyer's office). Admission to the practice of law, which has handled separately by each particular court until then, not on a uniform statewide basis, did not require any particular formal education at the time although literacy and access to law books was a practical necessity. It was not very regularized or bureaucratic. Often a referral from an existing lawyer was the main qualification and admission to the federal court bars for lawyers already admitted to practice in state courts still works that way today. So, it is highly unlikely that any particular state required (or even just highly encouraged) someone aspiring to practice law to know the Bible, to an extent more than this was encouraged for every literate adult. As additional context, the primary qualification for admission to institutions of higher education up until the late 1800s was not knowledge of the Bible, but a sound foundation in reading, writing and speaking Latin and Ancient Greek, a skill set which had both religious and secular applications. In the time period prior to the late 1800s, higher education mostly prepared young men for in the U.S. and in the North American colonies, either to be a member of the clergy (a track that naturally enough usually excluded most future lawyers), or to be a &quot;man of letters&quot; which primarily involved studying the classics, philosophy, rhetoric, history, and other humanities. Formal instruction in science, to the extent it happened, was taught as a subfield of philosophy (natural philosophy) or in connection to astronomy or math which were recognized as major academic disciplines in the early modern era in Europe. College educated &quot;men of letters&quot;, who often went on to practice law (although as many or more sought other careers in fields such as politics, diplomacy, civil service, and business), were probably more knowledgeable of Greco-Roman mythology, and classical works of history, philosophy and rhetoric, than they were especially knowledgeable about the Bible or theology. As the term suggests, these avocations were not necessarily seen as completely distinct careers. Instead, they were more akin to different specialities within the Uber-category of work done by college educated men. Notwithstanding the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, there were parts of the United States, mostly in New England, where government established churches continued in existence after the adoption of the 1791 Bill of Rights (which initially applied only to the federal government). But this had ceased to be the case a decade or two before the U.S. Civil War. By the time that the legal profession began to be systemically regulated, the divide between church and state was well established. So it is unlikely that Biblical knowledge would have been a formal, or even highly encouraged, requirement for the practice of law. My suspicion is that the statements you heard were the product of an educational movement, particularly common for religious home schooling, that has tried to claim, inaccurately, that the United States was a &quot;Christian nation&quot;. This movement often distorts historical reality in an effort to prove that point.
I'm not a lawyer, but under the law as it's written, I see two problems: 17 USC 121 allows "authorized entities" to make and publish accessible copies of works. An "authorized entity" is defined as a nonprofit organization or a governmental agency that has a primary mission to provide specialized services relating to training, education, or adaptive reading or information access needs of blind or other persons with disabilities. So if you, as a private citizen, decide to do this, it could conceivably be copyright infringement. You might have to set up some kind of non-profit organization to make it legal. It's also OK (I think) if you make such copies for your own personal use, so long as you don't redistribute them. So far as I can tell, nothing under 17 USC 121 requires the original publisher to provide an "authorized entity" with a copy in any particular format (PDF, paper, or otherwise) for making accessible copies. Basically, the law seems to have envisioned organizations of sighted people purchasing paper copies, transcribing them, and republishing them; not blind individuals doing electronic transcription for themselves. It might still be worth contacting Hal Leonard and asking what they can do for you, but unfortunately it doesn't look like the law requires them to do anything for you. As Nij points out in the comments, this really seems to be a question about the company's policy, rather than the law.
That book provides advice on legal writing; it is not a source of rules for legal writing. Rather than repeatedly identifying themselves using their full name, parties customarily refer to themselves in the third person, e.g., &quot;The defendant refused to waive his Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial.&quot; In practice, though, pro se litigants regularly refer to themselves in the first person, and there is no formal consequence for this.
The concept of &quot;ignorance&quot; of laws isn't about the individual. It's about administratibility of the system. The argument is that a system with a wide-ranging ignorance defense would struggle to produce results—just or otherwise. So the American system presumes knowledge of the law and then carves out narrower exceptions, such as mistake of law. For example, the law wasn't published, or it had been overruled. Alas, the question about why there isn't a hotline belongs on another site.
Standing requirements are different in state and federal courts, and from one state to the next. A random individual would not have standing to object to a stranger's abortion in federal court, and likely not in any state court, under normal circumstances, as they are not injured in any meaningful way by the abortion. I don't know what the normal rules of standing are in Texas, but it is likely perfectly acceptable for the Legislature to wave its wand to grant standing to whomever it wants regarding any violation of the law it sees for. That seems to be what is happening here.
Basically: what Flup said in his last paragraph (and so upvoted accordingly). Every one of the practitioners you named has an undergraduate degree from the UK, and an undergraduate degree from Canada. This, presumably, is because you're not permitted to practise law in most jurisdictions unless you have some kind of qualification in the law of that particular jurisdiction. The laws of each country, and moreover, the way in which cases are decided and in which each country's legal system works, varies so tremendously that you need to study the particulars for each jurisdiction before you can practice there. Regarding Canada: from this site: You must complete a Bachelor of Laws (L.L.B.) program or Juris Doctor (J.D.) program in order to qualify for bar membership in any Canadian province or territory. This generally takes three years to complete. In England and Wales, you can now take a law conversion course in place of an undergraduate law degree as a first stage towards being qualified. I suspect, however, looking at the dates of the judges you list, that the law conversion course wasn't an option at the time they got their qualifications, so their only option was a full undergraduate course. So the answer is: they each have two undergraduate qualifications, one from each jurisdiction, so that they could qualify to practise law in both jurisdictions.
In the west, the profession of being a &quot;lawyer&quot; came into existence under the Roman Empire, though there were sorta-lawyers in Ancient Greece (orators, who could not receive a fee for pleading on behalf of another). In Egypt, Sumer, Babylon, Persia and so on, there was nothing like a lawyer – you were to plead your own case if you ended up in a dispute / being accused of a crime. As far as I know, there were no lawyers under Chinese traditional law.
As a comment by @DavidSchwartz notes, this is not wrong. Questions of law but not fact are allowed. It is worth noting that the line drawn is arbitrary. In Colorado, where I practice, jurors issue written questions (pre-reviewed by the judge and counsel for all parties before being presented) to witnesses at the close of the testimony of each witness called by a party to testify. This is very helpful to counsel, as it provides indirect evidence of whether the jury understands what they are being told, and often juries will directly ask questions that for tactical reasons, both parties have refrained from asking that go to the heart of the matter. It also frequently clarifies misunderstandings that trained legal professionals assumed were not made about terminology. This is more problematic in criminal trials, where jury questions could provide evidence pushing a case over the threshold of proof needed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the prosecution failed to provide, than in civil cases with a preponderance of the evidence standard. Also, as a matter of reality, when jurors ask questions, counsel often loathe to object even when they have valid grounds to do so, for fear of offending the decision-maker, unless it is really critical to keep certain information away from the jury.