WOE UNTO YOU, LAWYERS!

Absurd? Preposterous? Think it over for a minute. Suppose the nation were
suddenly to wake up to the fact that all its affairs were being supervised and
controlled according to the language and principles of astrology, by a smart bunch of
astrologers. Would making the practice of astrology a crime seem absurd? Go back
and read over again the solemn judgment of the Supreme Court of lawyers in the
case of Senior v. Braden – or pick some other court opinion at random – and see
where the absurdity lies. Or are we just to go quietly and unquestioningly and
stupidly on, submitting the management of our entire civilization to the modern
medicine men?
The immediate answer is undoubtedly yes, but it need not be a permanent
answer. And if any popular movement to get rid of the lawyers and their Law, and to
put our system of social control on a common-sense basis, should ever make enough
headway for the lawyers to have to face it instead of scoffing at it, their chief
arguments against it – other than those already considered – would probably boil
down to two.
They would argue, in the first place, that even if the time-tested legal system,
with all its principles and its precedents, were scrapped and another sort of system
set up in its place, the new system would soon develop its principles and its
precedents too, and even its special language. Now if the new system were put in the
hands of lawyers, or of men trained and skilled principally in abstract logic, that
would unquestionably be so. But it would not be so if the new system were entrusted
– as it would be entrusted – to men trained and skilled in coping with practical
human problems. And it would particularly not be so if those in charge of the new
system were aware – as they would be aware – that there need be no pretense of
preordained certainty and consistency about their decisions, taken in the mass, but
rather a direct effort to deal intelligently and justly with each problem or dispute as it
came along.
Finally, the lawyers would argue that if The Law were scrapped and it became
generally known that fallible men rather than infallible and impersonal abstract
principles were dictating decisions which other men had to obey, then all respect for
law-and-order would vanish, and revolution or anarchy or both would ensue. But in
this argument – a typical magician’s argument in its conjuring up of frightful
imaginary hobgoblins – is displayed a strange and contemptuous mistrust of the
civilized tendencies of the nation. It implies that the whole structure of our society
would automatically go to pieces if it were put on a practical rather than a mystical
basis – an unwarranted assumption at best. Moreover, in this argument lies the crux
of the whole fraud of The Law.
For the average man’s respect, such as it is, for our present system of Law,
and his consequent willingness to let his life be run in mysterious fashion by the
114