Balkinization: What is Law?

Comments:

What's the law? That's easy. The voluminous, poorly written and logically inconsistent words, written by politicians from the legislative branch of government (in America anyway) as the direct consequential resolution of political power struggles among ecnomic elites (ostensibly elected by the citizenry to represent their "interests") seeking to control the distribution of wealth cooperatively produced by society but with little citizen input on the normative question of "what is an equitable distribution" while also seeking to regulate a broad spectrum of human behavior which if unregulated could prove disruptive of the cultural, moral, and economic status quo capable of undermining certainty in day to day relations among and between people and entities of differing socio-economic class status.

Well, that and to give lawyers, judges, court officials, debt collectors and the prison industrial complex a way to make a living settling disputes between aggrieved parties that could just as easily be settled with cage matches to the death on for-profit pay-per-view dish tv (which is all the masses really want anyway).

Prime example of one I'd pay good money to watch would be putting all the corporate executives, accountants, lawyers and judges (those who get big paydays whatever the ultimate outcome of the legal merits of the dispute) in a giant chainlink cage against all the blue collar workers (men and women) that get their pensions poached and unions busted through clever manipulation of the bankruptcy code when an entity (legal personhood with all the law's protections and not one iota of the moral accountability) is purposefully mismanaged so as to yield greater shareholder value by virtue of not having to deal with those pesky workers and their unions.

Justice and the law generally should be thought of as antonyms and never mentioned in the same sentence so long as the system of justice is pay to play with unequal time/money resources and lawyering abilities lining up on any side of a given legal dispute.

Who knows maybe I'm just cynical after three years of law school. Seems to me the law is really good at protecting billionaire grifters while making sure the little people never get wise to that fact because the best grifts are always legitimized under the majestic pagentry of "THE LAW" and its much revered (or loathed) practitioners.

# posted by

rrheard : 5:20 PM

'Sfunny, but rrheard's comment mirrors thoughts I was thinking as I ironed my shirt this morning. I've been clerking in a family law practice since September, and it's true that practicing lawyers think of The Law about the way a hawk thinks of the sky, which is to say not at all. Law is simply the medium in which the predator looks for it's next meal.

I suppose that's why some of us keep coming here.

Thanks for the SSRN link, and keep the faith.

# posted by

Robert Link : 8:06 AM

Law, say the gardeners, is the sun,
Law is the one
All gardeners obey
To-morrow, yesterday, to-day.

Law is the wisdom of the old,
The impotent grandfathers feebly scold;
The grandchildren put out a treble tongue,
Law is the senses of the young.

Law, says the priest with a priestly look,
Expounding to an unpriestly people,
Law is the words in my priestly book,
Law is my pulpit and my steeple.

Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose,
Speaking clearly and most severely,
Law is as I've told you before,
Law is as you know I suppose,
Law is but let me explain it once more,
Law is The Law.

Yet law-abiding scholars write:
Law is neither wrong nor right,
Law is only crimes
Punished by places and by times,
Law is the clothes men wear
Anytime, anywhere,
Law is Good morning and Good night.

Others say, Law is our Fate;
Others say, Law is our State;
Others say, others say
Law is no more,
Law has gone away.

And always the loud angry crowd,
Very angry and very loud,
Law is We,
And always the soft idiot softly Me.

If we, dear, know we know no more
Than they about the Law,
If I no more than you
Know what we should and should not do
Except that all agree
Gladly or miserably
That the Law is
And that all know this
If therefore thinking it absurd
To identify Law with some other word,
Unlike so many men
I cannot say Law is again,

No more than they can we suppress
The universal wish to guess
Or slip out of our own position
Into an unconcerned condition.
Although I can at least confine
Your vanity and mine
To stating timidly
A timid similarity,
We shall boast anyway:
Like love I say.

Like love we don't know where or why,
Like love we can't compel or fly,
Like love we often weep,
Like love we seldom keep.

-- W. H. Auden

# posted by

Stephen : 3:03 PM

Law is a set of compulsory rules of behavior of a society.

Everything else is description, not definition.

Done.

# posted by

David : 4:03 PM