I think it's just something about Law as a discipline that it attracts people who can be very literal-minded and who at least in their own mind are moral crusaders.
Since this whole case is, um, horribly embarrassing to my profession, I'll just respond here and move on. The huge majority of lawyers I know are much more like the EFF lawyers here than like Carreon. They're smart, creative, resilient, flexible, and more often than not they're honest and respectful. Some of them do it for moral reasons and some are just doing a job; some of them make the world a lot better in my opinion and some of them end up screwing it up. But there's not one lawyer I know who I can imagine acting anything like Carreon, let alone his wife. I mean, even the few jerks would at least make more effective choices.
In short: don't think of this guy as a typical lawyer. He's not. Think of him as a typical guy-screwing-up-his-career-with-a-weird,-paranoid-flameout,-in-an-unusually-public-way-thanks-to-the-internet. It's just too bad he happens to have a career that will let him waste a lot of other people's time in the process ...
Oh! I'm sorry, it occurs to me that my comment can indeed be read that way, and that's not what I intended.
I mean it as "they attract these people", not "they are mostly these people:" the tiny percentage of society which is A is much more likely to be L, but that does not mean that most L's are A. So for example I would guess that most programmers are pretty sociable people, but we have a nasty reputation as highly antisocial because we attract people who prefer programming to partying. The Catholic church can tell you all about their difficulties with this type of thing.
Hey, thanks for the clarification. That's a totally fair point. I was probably a little over-eager to reply here since this story so much invites the lawyers-are-evil thing and I've been looking for a chance to put it in context. Like, "yes OK lawyers are evil sometimes but this isn't that." :)
After thinking more about it, the literal-minded moral crusade is something I've definitely seen in the legal system, not from lawyers but from pro se parties -- non-lawyers who are representing themselves. There's a group of people who are absolutely sure that the world has wronged them and that they'll eventually be able to make everyone understand, but are unable to parse or accept the reality checks they're getting back from the system, so they go through a series of lawyers before striking out on their own. I bet any clerk's office you walked into, they could name a handful of people like that who they recognize by sight when they come in to file their next complaint (and then a complaint against the judge who handled the last complaint, and so on). They're sad situations.
I don't really know anything about Carreon or the rest of this mess, but assuming that's what's happening, maybe there's some observer bias here -- the reason we're hearing about this at all is that he is a lawyer, so he's able to navigate the system well enough to cause real trouble, at least for a while.
Since this whole case is, um, horribly embarrassing to my profession, I'll just respond here and move on. The huge majority of lawyers I know are much more like the EFF lawyers here than like Carreon. They're smart, creative, resilient, flexible, and more often than not they're honest and respectful. Some of them do it for moral reasons and some are just doing a job; some of them make the world a lot better in my opinion and some of them end up screwing it up. But there's not one lawyer I know who I can imagine acting anything like Carreon, let alone his wife. I mean, even the few jerks would at least make more effective choices.
In short: don't think of this guy as a typical lawyer. He's not. Think of him as a typical guy-screwing-up-his-career-with-a-weird,-paranoid-flameout,-in-an-unusually-public-way-thanks-to-the-internet. It's just too bad he happens to have a career that will let him waste a lot of other people's time in the process ...