WOE UNTO YOU, LAWYERS!

CHAPTER IX
INCUBATORS OF THE LAW
“The legal apprentice he sweats and he strains
To memorize every principle;
He’d learn a lot more in the end for his pains
By studying something sinciple.”– Anon.
As every good fascist knows, the perpetuation of the fascist fraud depends, in
the long run, on the training of fledglings in the faith. The dictators catch their
conscripts young and discipline them to think in goose-step. Promises of reward for
the faithful and ominous warnings about the dangers of nonconformity play their
part in making apprentices firmly believe a mass of lies, half-lies, and nonsense.
Doubt, even the tiniest wondering doubt, is the cardinal sin. There are few heretics.
The Law cannot catch its communicants so young. But the same mental
goose step and the same kind of hopes and fears are used, perhaps not so
purposefully but just as efficaciously, to instill a fighting belief in the nonsense of
The Law. And of course it is on the rigid training of apprentices in the art that the
perpetuation of the legal legend depends.
There was a time when The Law, like other more substantial and more useful
trades, was learned in the shop of a full-blown practitioner. An aspiring lawyer
studied his precepts and his principles while serving a term as office assistant to
some member of the bar. Today the members of the bar must usually pay for their
assistance with something more than a lot of legal language dressed up as words of
wisdom. The trade has acquired academic pretensions, and those citadels of logical
legerdemain known as law schools are not the incubators of The Law.
Consequently, the hope of The Law – that is, the hope of the lawyers that their
game will go on indefinitely, undiminished and undisputed – lies with the law
schools. And conversely, the one slim hope that the big balloon of inflated nonsense
may ever be exploded by internal combustion lies with the law schools too. Once
the professional gibberish-jugglers have proceeded beyond the training stage, it is
almost always too late. They have to be caught young-in-The-Law to be turned into
disciples – or heretics.
In order to teach apprentices how to talk the language and how to reason in the
proper abstract circles, the law schools have divided The Law’s mass of principles
into big chunks. Each chunk represents a “field” of Law and is taught in a separate
course, or courses. There are Contracts and Torts and Trusts. There are
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