That’s the nicest way I can put it, by quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes, I think it was.  Again, two seconds on Google is too long for me, as I’ve set the timer for ten minutes and am determined to get on with it.

We’ll go with the Q & A format today:

Do you regret the three years in law school, forty plus thousand in debt and the ten years practicing that miserable (for the subsistence lawyer) profession?

I don’t regret it.  School has always come easily to me, I like books, at least 30% of what I studied was interesting.   The discipline and structure of law, so foreign to my way of thinking and so much the lingua franca of our world, was worth subjecting myself to, I think.   Standing in front of certain judges was a sickening exercise, and I saw up close the corruption of the system.   Shoot, I saw that already in the NYC school system.  Regrettable as the whole adventure was, I don’t really regret it, no.

Are you a hopeless romantic, then?

Hopeless, probably.  Romantic, well, you’d get an argument there from some people.  One person’s romance is the other person’s self-indulgent narcissistic daydream, I suppose.  But we were talking about the law, were we not?

Who are you asking?

Funny!  I didn’t realize you had a sense of humor.  Right, then.  Yes, the law.   What is it about the law that is so disgusting?

Are you asking the questions now, as well as answering zem?

It so would appear, yes, and with less than five minutes left on the clock, it would behoove us to keep things moving.  What is so disgusting about a blunt instrument is to see it used on things it cannot possibly help.  Some wit said if the only tool you have is a hammer the answer to every question will be a hammer.

A hammer?

Yes.  Now, as I was saying, the blunt instrument of Western Law, and probably every kind of law that industrial societies are based on, was designed to protect the property of the wealthy.   If you take a fine-toothed comb over the US Constitution, famed around the world as the blueprint for democratic government, and the first such charter, you will eventually discover three discreet phrases, inserted by lawyers who owned slaves, that make it perfectly legal to import and own ‘such persons as the states shall see fit to admit’ and that, if you own enough of them, your representation in Congress would be enhanced by 60% of the voting power of such creatures, if God had seen fit to give them the vote instead of chains and an angry, poor, sunburned white man to whip them. 

“Pish tosh!”, you say, “ancient history!” as I see 39 seconds left on the clock.  Let me just say this then:  read the Constitution, read The Slaugtherhouse Cases and Cruikshank, observe the almost century-long-sleep of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments and have a very nice day, there’s the beeper.