Woe Unto You, Lawyers!

Abstract

ion. 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 “justice” for granted than you can cut it up and stuff it into cubbyholes of legal language. The lawyer who would defend the abstract language of The Law is right as rain when he says that people think and talk of human conduct in abstract ways, in terms of “right” and “wrong,” “fair” and “unfair.” But he is dead wrong as soon as he asserts that the strange-sounding abstractions of The Law have any more real or necessary relation to ideals about human conduct than they have to the facts of human conduct. Legal words and concepts and principles float in a purgatory of their own, halfway between the heaven of abstract ideals and the hell of plain facts and completely out of touch with both of them. Anyway that is why, in the last analysis, the language of The Law is inherently meaningless. It purports on the one hand to tie up in a general way with specific fact situations. It purports on the other hand to tie up in a general way to the great abstractions, “justice.” Yet, in trying to bridge the gap between the facts and the abstraction, so that “justice” may be “scientifically” and almost automatically applied to practical problems, The Law has only succeeded in developing a liturgy of principles too far removed from the facts to have any meaning in relation to the facts and too far removed from the abstraction to make any sense in