Right to know the law

One can't force people to become tough and realistic if they aren't built for it. In "To Kill a Mockingbird," Atticus Finch ultimately agrees that the town weirdo, who turns out to be a good guy, is so shy that he must be shielded from the publicity he'd suffer if he were to be put on trial for killing the bad guy. Moral of the story: If you insist on making sweet people tough just so that they do a better job of protecting them in court, you wind up with the psychological equivalent of a Vietnam soldier's comment: "It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it."

You can't really fault meek people for avoiding the legal system. It disrupts their peace and contentment for the flimsiest reasons, but restores their domestic bliss, if ever, only after a bitter struggle. Litigation, for these people, is not just a matter of paperwork. It exposes them to a whole world of meanness from which they've been marvellously free. Throwing them into this pit shouldn't be done lightly.


Lawyers and judges might not understand this point. Remember how I said that "thinking like a lawyer" involves accepting a set of attitudes that lay people won't understand? A couple of them come into play here, such as: If in doubt, you should request more information, not less, about a person's business affairs or private life; ordinary people are wrong in not being political, cynical, and paranoid; and it's wrong to avoid fighting in defence of your rights.

In the end, the legal system demands realism of everyone. To my mind, that reeks of political persecution of the meek. They've got a right, I say, to be spicy and sweet. Those people create the domestic situations that enable the rest of us to go out there and work hard. The longer our system of law and legal education is permitted to go on making us mean, the fewer there will be who'll have the strength, or even remember how, to be trusting and relaxed toward others.

They say the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. But eternal vigilance by everyone leaves no time for liberty. It is essential for our kind of society that a large number of us have the right to live innocently, and that we limit the freedom of lawyers to attack that innocence without first evaluating the merits and consequences of their attacks.

The Rights

There's a right to know the law. Some people don't want to discover that they've been breaking the law without knowing it. Others don't want the police to have an excuse to harass them just because they're oddballs. Some simply don't want to try a business idea, or invest money, or take a risk, and then hear some judge tell them that, even though there was no law on the subject before, it's now officially declared to be an illegal activity.

There's a right, I think, to like my fellow man. I can't do that if I've got to view him as a potential adversary. On the contrary, competition somehow manages to bleed through from one area of life into another, and especially if I'm playing to win. I want to be able to assume that the other guy is thinking good things about me, if he's thinking of me at all. We show, over and over, in the foxholes and the bars, that that friendly attitude comes naturally - at least when our training in hyper-competition isn't befuddling us.

We have a right to some personal dignity. It's not fair that we should be less protected if, by failing to complain constantly, we make it possible for some future judge to look back and say, "Well, he wasn't griping then, so it must not have bothered him." Along those lines, there's a right to obtain a decent resolution of minor disputes without having to blow them up into federal cases before the courts will pay attention to them.

I'm sure there's a right to work hard and save money, without automatically becoming a target for everyone who wants to take advantage of your desire to get back to work by yanking you around in the courts until you pay a nuisance fee to get rid of them. And there's got to be a right to run a business without being victimized by the courts.

Finally, and most offensively to my legal friends, I suspect there's a right to be inarticulate. Sometimes you just don't know what to say. That happens when you're shocked. It also happens when you're dealing with the really important things, for which you sometimes can't find adequate words. There really are those times, you know, when a lack of words is the way to go, when explanations would take too long or just wouldn't capture the instant simplicity of the situation.

Conclusions

It is not difficult to wrap up the situation in the law as we now confront it, and to present to you an image of what you're doing, in the big picture, if you become a lawyer and do nothing to improve the legal system.

A Study in Anarchy

There's no sign that legal experts are keeping up with recent changes, such as the transformation of the legal profession into a business. Only the wildest optimist would see any reason to believe that, beyond keeping up with the changes, the experts are making sure that the legal system of the future will be better than the one we have now.

Our legal system takes great precautions to make sure that the truth comes out in trial, and then forces nearly everyone to avoid a trial by settling out of court. On the criminal side, it announces a goal, like reformation, and then fails, and then announces another goal, like deterrence, and fails at that, and then announces another goal...