Words. Words. Words.

This week, in order to be generally difficult, I've decided to post my Freedom of Speech reflection on legal reasoning. If you want to see the assignment title you can click here , but I heartily recommend against it- what I produced has very little to do with enchantment or social change. And yes, I am grossly misusing Shakespeare in my title.

I studied law for 2 years before coming to UConn, and never once did anyone ever think to ask what the law was or why we had it, and certainly not what principle lay at the core of legal reasoning. The questions were laughable- no one, I think, assumed that there was somehow a higher power, an omnipotent, intangible Justification of Law. The law was the law, and it existed because Parliament said so, and we were only interested in learning its rules, its application, and, sometimes, its potential for change. If you really wanted a deeper understanding, you took a theoretical class, marked yourself out as a future research student, and, ultimately, learned that the law is nothing more than rules upon rules, coloured by the moral leanings of distant judges. Things are so much simpler in a Monarchy.

And yet, I think that if you question any lawyer for long enough, and get past the parroting of rules and doctrines and principles, you will ultimately end up in a situation in which they try to explain that at some level law isn’t so much about ‘this rule says that A is wrong’ as ‘we know that A is wrong.’ All lawyers- and, for that matter, laypersons- want there to be some deep-seated meaning behind what we do, some justification for making judgments the way we do. We hope that through legal discussion , through the adversarial system, through dissents and concurrences and law reform and picketing, we can finally uncover just why A is wrong, and follow that shining star to a brighter and better world.

And yet, as we have seen, people don’t change their minds easily, and, more often than not, this fiery exchange of ideas takes place almost exclusively in the lawyer’s head, or within the pages of an obscure journal. Never where we would like it to be, outside in the open, where it can influence the collective mind of ‘the People,’ and lead to true democratic change. When these debates do come to the public’s attention, they are inevitably reduced to the level of short, cant banners, to all-caps YouTube comments, to easy-to-remember slogans. Discussion and debate are thrown out of the window- and it is questionable just how much they would help, even in an ideal world. I know that my views on DOMA and the same-sex marriage issue are right, and while I’ll happily debate them until the sun goes down with anyone foolish enough to volunteer, I also know that I will not change my mind easily. Given that human nature is what it is, and that there are many, many more versions of myself out there on both sides of the debate, the entire operation is rendered worthless.

And so sometimes the law is changed, not through the collective voice of we the People, but according to the personal beliefs of 9- or, more realistically, 5- members of the Supreme Court, through the use of highly persuasive, beautifully drafted, and above all, logical judgments, none of which can withstand a thorough philosophical investigation into its reasoning. Which, it seems, is why we don’t look: it is very scary- close to anarchy- to be reminded that the law is nothing more than words, interpreted by morals.