WOE UNTO YOU, LAWYERS!

themselves have often done it with a whole body of written laws; they call it
“codifying” the laws. There is no reason why a chosen group of non-lawyers should
not codify the present laws of every state, and of the federal government as well, and
codify them so that it no longer takes a lawyer to translate them into significance.
Any law that means something definite and tangible in relation to human affairs can
be written so that its meaning is plain for all to read. Any law that means nothing
except as lawyer and lawyer-judges put content into its inherently content-less
language has no business staying on the books.
Furthermore, any law which, instead of laying down rules itself, turns over the
solution of certain factual types of problems to a group of experts or administrators
should say perfectly frankly what it is doing and should define in factual instead of
legal language the field within which the experts are to make rules and decisions.
Why conceal behind vague generalities the fact that the Securities and Exchange
Commission has been given, within vague limits, the power to make rules for the
running of the New York Stock Exchange? Why not make the granting of power
simple and direct; and why not make the limits of the power specific instead of
leaving their determination to the lawyer-judges’ subsequent and haphazard
“interpretation” of the statute’s legal language?
Similarly, any written law which, though laying down a broad rule, leaves to a
court or some such deciding body the precise application of its rule to the fact of any
particular problem should say that it is doing just that. “First degree murder is
punishable by death” makes no real sense as a statute because “first degree murder”
makes no sense except in relation to the abstract legal principles which are said to
define it. “When a court (whether judge or jury or both or some other kind of
deciding body) finds that one person has killed another person and believes that the
killer deserves to be electrocuted, the court may order that he be electrocuted” is
equally descriptive of the rule and much more accurate. Why not phrase the statute
that way, so everyone would know just what it did mean? Then, if we should want
the rule to be more precise, the written law could be made more precise – instead of
pretending that the words “first degree murder” contribute toward preciseness or
toward anything but obscureness and unintelligibility.
For, of course, there would still have to be courts, or judges, or
decision-makers, under any orderly system of social control, even though written
laws were made intelligible to all. There would have to be decision-makers to
determine the true facts behind any dispute, and then to apply to the dispute the
terms of any written laws, whether those laws were so precise that their application
was almost automatic, or whether they left room for the decision-makers to exercise
their own discretion and their own sense of justice. There would have to be
decision-makers, too, to settle any disputes which were not covered by written laws.
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