WOE UNTO YOU, LAWYERS!

CHAPTER VI
THE LAW AND THE LADY
“Women have, commonly, a very positive moral
sense; that which they will, is right; that which
they reject, is wrong.” – Henry Adams
The lawyers have made such a complicated mess out of the word-game they
call legal reasoning that any effort to dissect even a tiny part of that reasoning and
show it up for the fake that it is, inevitably makes tough going. In a sense, that fact
has been the intellectual Maginot Line of The Law. Plenty of people have long
suspected that the lawyers with their long words were indulging in nothing more nor
less than wholesale flimflam, but when it comes down to trying to take the flimflam,
with all its myriad trappings, apart, people just can’t be bothered. And even a
personally conducted tour through the mirror mazes of legal logic becomes tiring
and confusing.
It may, however, be possible to indicate something of the futility and
irrelevance of legal processes merely by an imaginary application of the legal way of
settling problems to a field in which decisions are customarily made in a more direct
and efficient manner. Suppose, just for instance, a housewife – by repute one of the
more practical species of human being – were to run her affairs for a day according
to the legal pattern of principles, counter-principles, and concepts. Suppose ---.
In the first place, she would of course be guided, from afar, by a dim and
conveniently ambiguous ideal of personal justice. She would be bothered about
doing the right thing, making the right decision, but since she would be her own
Supreme Court, anything she did would be right – after she did it. The difficulty
would lie in deciding beforehand what to do and what not to do, in accordance with
the inexorable rules of her personal Law.
That Law would have two primary principles. The first would be that
anything which seems presently desirable is right. The second would be that
anything which seems presently desirable is likely, in the long run, to be wrong. Of
course, the two principles might occasionally seem to conflict in their application to
a specific fact situation, but that would be of minor importance since both, in the
abstract, would be entirely valid lergal principles. Each, moreover, would be
buttressed with sub-principles and sub-sub-principles which might come in handy in
making certain sorts of decisions.
The lady’s day begins. Her first decision, obviously, is whether to get up or
lie in bed a little longer. She remembers that The Law is that anything which seems
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