Lawyers are the most dynamic and critical component of America’s justice system. As the enforcer of constitutional rights, a lawyer assumes far-reaching levels of importance in daily life. Law has no meaning without lawyers. When Congress is slow to act, attorneys respond to national changes swiftly by protecting their clients. They ensure that growing threats to democracy, economic liberty, and basic rights are immediately put to rest. However, today’s lawyers are almost entirely exclusive to the elite. The cost of lawyers has ballooned by over 41% since 1986. As a result, a staggering 92% of low-income Americans do not have access to civil lawyers. This drives a dangerous phenomenon—lawyerless justice—where poor, uneducated Americans are ambushed by wealthy, well-versed lawyers.

Lawyers are the most dynamic and critical component of America’s justice system. As the enforcer of constitutional rights, a lawyer assumes far-reaching levels of importance in daily life. Law has no meaning without lawyers. When Congress is slow to act, attorneys respond to national changes swiftly by protecting their clients. They ensure that growing threats to democracy, economic liberty, and basic rights are immediately put to rest. However, today’s lawyers are almost entirely exclusive to the elite. The cost of lawyers has ballooned by over 41% since 1986. As a result, a staggering 92% of low-income Americans do not have access to civil lawyers. This drives a dangerous phenomenon—lawyerless justice—where poor, uneducated Americans are ambushed by wealthy, well-versed lawyers.

The advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution has heralded a new era of strategic competition,where wars are increasingly waged in cyberspace and below the threshold of armed conflict. United States law, however, has only slowly adapted, ex post facto, to the onslaught of hybrid and gray-zone cyberattacks, relying instead on conventional cost imposition and a strategy of “persistent engagement” that cedes initiative to the attacker by emphasizing defense over deterrence. Our faith in existing domestic and international laws to adequately dissuade cybercriminal activity has left stretching loopholes in juridical processes determining the threshold for retaliation. Consequently, cyberattacks are occurring at an alarming frequency because adversarial states progressively view them as a low-cost option to achieve national objectives; in the past two years alone, over forty major cyber incidents targeted the United States, many of which were intended to disrupt the democratic lifeblood of our country: the electoral process.