WOE UNTO YOU, LAWYERS!

very clearly or precisely either. “Due process of law” is just as definite as
“dictatorship.” “Constitutional” or “unconstitutional” isn’t any more ambiguous
that “good” or “bad.”
Moreover, he will go on, the whole ideal and purpose of The Law is to
maintain, in human relations and affairs, a well-known popular abstraction called
“justice.” Try to define “justice” any more accurately than you can define any legal
concept you can think of! As a matter of fact, the chief intent of The Law, as a
complicated science, is to make the idea of “justice” more precise, to make it more
readily and more certainly applicable to any fact situation, any problem, any dispute
that may ever arise. And you can’t split an abstract ideal into separate parts – you
can’t reduce it to principles and sub-principles – without phrasing them in abstract
and therefore somewhat imprecise terms. Hence, legal language.
The answer to this defense of The Law and its language is contained right in
the defendant’s own plea. Even leaving aside the obvious fact that The Law time
after time produces results that strike most people as wickedly unfair or “unjust” – in
which case the lawyers invariably say: “Th, th; too bad; but that’s The Law all right”
– the answer is still there. The answer is that you can’t split an abstract ideal into
separate parts – you can’t reduce it to principles and sub-principles. Period.
The whole business of trying to split up “justice” into parts, or principles, in
order to get a better, surer grasp of it is absurd as cutting up a worm in order to get a
better hold of it. In the first place, the original animal is quickly disintegrated in the
process. In the second place, each new little piece, each sub-principle, becomes a
squirming abstraction in its own right. Each is now as hard to grab hold of, as hard
to pin down to preciseness, as was the mother abstraction.
Thus you will rarely find the lawyers, or the judges either, trying to apply the
concept of “justice” to the settlement of a legal problem. Instead, you will find them
fighting over a dozen equally abstract concepts, all phrased in legal language of
course, and trying to decide which of those should be applied. And, as noted before,
the choice of the “right” concepts or of the “controlling” principles is a highly
haphazard and arbitrary business, no matter how simple the facts of the problem.
For facts don’t fit into “consideration” or “affection with a public interest” any more
automatically or certainly than they fit into “justice.”
Moreover, and this is even more important, the concentration of The Law on
its own pet brood of concepts and principles has meant the sad disintegration of the
old-fashioned non-legal idea of “justice.” Lawyers are always so absorbed in their
little game of matching legal abstractions that they have all but forgotten the one
abstraction which is the excuse for there being any Law at all. They take “justice”
for granted and stick to their “contracts” and their “torts.” But you can no more take
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