Ever Increasing Complexity

My good friend Ed Hopkins is probably the second most well-read person I know. This morning he interjected some observations about what would impress him about law students (he's a law student). I responded.

It's interesting to observe the ways in which you describe the distinctions between law students amongst themselves. We lay-victims only notice your collective capacity to exploit our petty jealousies, defend the indefensible, and destroy the value of common sense. The most telling phrase I hear attorneys say is 'pray that you never need me', which I do on occasion. I'm not trying to demonize, but I do wonder if the legal profession has arced towards dealing only with the troublesome. In other words, what is it that draws ordinary people through the profession that makes them ultimately defenders of our increasingly complex and obfuscated law. Is there not, ever, an effort to simplify?

It took me a very long time to understand the value of complex law. The analogy was that law is like a dense jungle between the desire of mankind and the object of his desire. Were it not difficult to negotiate, everyone would get everything all the time. Thus the value of law's complexity is to allow a man to do anything, but only if he is most persistent. At this point, it only sounds like bad religion - a series of fetishised fetters on our freedom for our own good.

Of course I defend the concept of liberty, freedom under the law, but I am always concerned that the law is becoming more like that microlubricant that Carroll Shelby hawks. It doesn't only get between the friction generating engine parts, it penetrates into the steel itself.

We are now met on the great battlefield for the future of the American economy, and its banking system in particular. We are in a Depression, so says Judge Posner, and I agree with his thesis. So we are faced, ultimately with dealing with the networked effects of what passes for the wisdom of the moment. There is plenty of evidence from the information that I get, that that wisdom is neither great nor consistent and so will inevitably cost us. We are trying to think our way out of one pain for fear of taking it on the chin and so are likely to navigate ourselves into a position of catching a blow to the throat.

The law is an ossified relief of the positions of policy which fit more or less within the bounds of Constitutionality. And yet as I look at the law from the perspective of a software programmer and essayist, I know that it cannot be as logically sound as all that. The imagination of attorneys to make citations outside of a narrow context would be impossibly constrained were the law to flow from a singular perspective. It would not be a dense jungle but a concrete maze.

I worry today, in spite of my conservative bearing, that we do not take some libertarian opportunity to clear the legal jungle as our economy undergoes drastic change. More specifically, and in reference to the passing of the Special Interest State, we need that room.