WOE UNTO YOU, LAWYERS!

CHAPTER III
THE WAY IT WORKS
“…the lawless science of our law,
That codeless myriad of precedent
That wilderness of single instances.” --Alfred, Lord Tennyson
In order to demonstrate up to the hilt that the whole of The Law is a hoax, a
balloon, a lot of empty words, it would presumably be necessary to take each
principle and sub-principle and counter-principle of The Law in turn and divest each
one of its dazzling legal trappings so that the non-lawyer could see that there was
nothing inside any of them. Plainly, that would be impossible. The lawyer-judges
alone turn out each year hundreds upon hundreds of books full of nothing but
refinements of The Law and its principles. Tremendous libraries overflow with
volumes which are not even about The Law but which are part of The Law.
(Lawyers, incidentally, spend most of their working lives trying to make a small
dent in the mountains of literature that help make up The Law.) Yet it may perhaps
serve the general deflating, or disrobing, purpose to take the legal pants, step by easy
step, off a few simple and entirely typical examples of The Law in action.
The field of Law known as Contracts is one of the most settled, most
venerable, and least politically complicated fields of Law. It is the field of Law that
deals with the agreements, business or otherwise, that men – or companies (but
companies, remember, are nothing but men to The Law) – make with each other.
Those agreements usually consist of one man promising to do one thing, such as to
dig a ditch, and another man promising to do another thing, such as to hand over $50.
Of course, if men could be trusted to keep their promises there would be no excuse
for a Law of Contracts – but then if men could be trusted to act decently in general
there would be little need for Law of any kind. As a matter of fact, only gamblers
trust each other to keep their promises, for The Law will not stoop to enforce a
gambling agreement or bet. The whole Law of Contracts is based on the idea that
men in general cannot be trusted to keep their promises, and around this area of
mutual mistrust The Law lays down its principles.
The first principle is that before you can have a Contract that The Law will
uphold, you must have an Offer by one party and an Acceptance by another party.
(Only The Law insists on making a “party” out of a single person.) What then, in the
first place, is a legal Offer? It is something quite different from an ordinary
non-legal offer, in the sense that the man in the street might use that word. A lawyer
would scoff at the notion that most offers were Offers.
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