Law

Law could not have taken birth without lawyers. There was an idea of course, there was a code that had its roots in reportedly ancient rites and customs. But this code needed to be practiced, to be knead into the dough and sweat of everyday life. This practice was put in place more by the lawyers than the police, the police was just hired by the bureaucracy to give a visible face to fear. The police has done its bit, it has put up a face to match the needs of its commissioning agency, but law is but bland fodder for the police force, it couldn't care less. They do not memorise the entire code, with its numeric short reference digits. They just upkeep the dominant social notions of acceptability. If it is OK, it is legal as far as they are concerned.

The lawyers fabricate the whole web of legalese we live in, by actively pursuing their victims and by upholding the value of knowing the law at all. Law is a monopoly, contracts are prepared by lawyers, read by lawyers, negotiated by lawyers. No one in the middle gets a foot in. It might seem that law only encodes the moral, ethical and fair-play concerns of people. It might seem that law has no mind of its own and blindly follows the desires expressed, it might seem that law is a just a language with a syntax and a context. But that is not true, law has a will, it has a spirit, it has eyes which spew blood on everything it sees. Both the flip sides of life in a law-bound society are created by the existence of the code and its enactment by the community of lawyers.

A little bit more needs to be known. This lawyer I know gets up in the morning and peers into the urban landscape for any leak of crime that she can plug. Plugging leaks of crimes only leads to unspent, pent-up criminal energy to throttle the system. If you want the establish a minimum base-line for a ethical way of living, you have to minimise the extent of things that law has something to say about. You have to let systems reach a level of animal equilibrium. The flaw is that even when you have laws you know that as long as you can conceal incidents well, breaking them is not a problem. Breaking a law doesn't render you unfit to be a human in the first place. Human-rights of criminals are still intact. The intrinsic ability to follow not a social code but a code of the species is missing or as yet unrealised in humans. Law as a beautiful tapestry that exhibits the genetic makeup that informs our nature does not exist. That would be a law that would inspire social pride. I mean we would go out on Sundays and look at that tapestry.

Also, accepting as a received fact that everything that advances through time in a species helps it survive, has value for the evolutionary project; then what is the evolutionary benefit of not having a code of the species? How does it help humans to be able to do anything as opposed to being an animal that does what it does? How does it help humans to have law?