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Have you ever wondered what the ultimate goal of elder law is? Take out an AARP magazine and thumb through it for awhile, and you will start to get a clue of the ultimate goals of elder law. The geriatric community is just like everybody else, after all. They want to be respected, and to have as much power as they can possibly lay their hands on. And in doing this, they want to make sure that they can keep all that they have worked for so long to grow and build. In a sense, elder law is a little bit like the law of minors, only for people who are at the other end of the bell curve. While children can not fight for their own rights because they have never learned how, the geriatric community often can not fight for their rights because they may have forgotten how.
In some cases, elder law runs into the barrier that elderly people tend to be overly trusting of others. In most cases, people are reasonably trustworthy. But in that one case where they are not, you have the issue of people who may be afraid to fight for their own rights. Everyone has the right to be treated fairly and told the truth. Slick talking scam artists are precisely the kinds of people who violate the rights of others whenever it suits their purposes, with the self justification that they can do whatever they want. Not rational, but crime is stupid in general.
Elder law is in full effect when it genuinely serves the interests of the people. It is not some kind of billionaire service tool like contract law. Nor is it designed to serve crackpot inventors, the way patent and trademark laws try to. Elder law is a whole different kind of discipline, in that it is about protecting what people have earned across a life time, and have little time to rebuild if it is taken from them. There are abusers, there are scam artists, and there are their victims. Elder law is the victim’s best defense.
