WOE UNTO YOU, LAWYERS!

The Law, toward the side that talks his old brand of legal dialect. Which means that
he will lean toward the side where the money lies – and The Law will lean with him.
There is one more important reason why The Law regularly tends to favor the
rich, the conservatives, the people and companies with plenty of money and property
who, not unnaturally, want to keep all their money and property and keep on getting
more of it in the same old ways. This reason is inherent in the very nature of The
Law itself. For The Law, you may remember, purports to be a great body of
changeless abstract truths. Times change, and ways of living change, and the facts
of human affairs change, but the principles of The Law remain unmoved and
steadfast. In short, The Law, by its own definition, is a stand-pat science.
And of course it is the wealthy and well-to-do who are always stand-patters;
the poor and the not-so-well-to-do are the progressives and the radicals. The
moneyed groups are for the most part very nicely satisfied with the old arrangements
of things. Justice or no justice – in the original Christian sense of the word – they
don’t want to see the rules shifted in the game of getting ahead in the world. And
they find in The Law a philosophical and less obviously selfish defense of their
resistance to change.
They also find in The Law something more solid and more useful than a
philosophical defense of conservatism. For The Law, mysteriously brought to earth
by lawyers and judges, does control all earthly affairs. And in being transmuted
from abstract principles into specific decisions about human disputes and problems,
it retains its reactionary flavor. New rules of the game, new arrangements in men’s
activities, new considerations of what is practical and what is fair, fit less smoothly
and less snugly into The Law’s scheme of principles than do the old considerations,
the old arrangements, the old rules.
That is one reason why so much “progressive legislation” – meaning laws that
try to change the rules to favor the poor at the expense of the rich – is either damned
entirely or “interpreted” into ineffectiveness by the courts. The novel arrangements
just don’t slide easily into the old unchanging principles of Law. For instance, the
newfangled notion that a worker ought to be paid a living wage didn’t stand a chance
when it first came up against the age-old Law-encrusted right of a corporation to pay
its workers as little as it pleased. There might have been a law about it, but The Law
had never heard of such a thing. Similarly, the idea that a homeless man might be
legally justified in breaking into an empty house to sleep – an idea that could
certainly be argued from the standpoint of pure, unadulterated justice – would be
laughed out of court today. As would the idea that a bond salesman, whose glib
assurances had led an old lady to invest her savings, could be sued by the old lady for
what she lost when the bonds later became worthless.
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