Law in Contemporary Society

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AllGreatProblemsComeFromTheStreetsOrTheLaw 4 - 22 Jan 2013 - Main.IanSullivan
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 Judge Day tells us that justice on the streets is getting what you deserve: “…all great problems come from the streets. Do you know what the definition of justice is on the streets? You get what you deserve (80). Oddly, this definition of justice is her description for the code amongst lawyers: “…a lawyer will get even…that’s how the system retributes itself. It really does. How do they say it on the street? – ‘what you do comes back on you’” (75). This seems to suggest that lawyers are just as unruly, lawless, and disillusioned as those on the streets that must resort to this type of justice to fight for their nearsighted and selfish vision of liberty (“Everyone with a different sense of when the law should protect our liberty. Always…at the expense of someone else’s” (80).)

Presumably the cause of all this is the law, which after all (perhaps even more than politicians), exerts power on people’s minds. It would certainly make sense that it is the law that has made lawyers what they are. Lawyers’ schooling in the law, their dissecting and discerning it, has made them liars, full of double and triple-talk and spin. Lawyers do not know what is real or true anymore because lawyers are not real people: “Real people know what the real truth is!” (73). It is the law itself, as it is currently formulated, that is creating the problem. This is exemplified the battered woman, sentencing case that Judge Day must preside over the next day. Nine years minimum is intuitively wrong given the years of abuse, but that is the law. The law is unintuitive, powerful, and ultimately dehumanizing – because of it no one knows the real truth (certainly not lawyers) and thus no one is a real person. Moreover, in the eyes of the law, people are not people. Like the battered woman’s children, “They’re part of the record” (84).


Revision 4r4 - 22 Jan 2013 - 18:08:16 - IanSullivan
Revision 3r3 - 04 Jun 2012 - 19:47:25 - MeiqiangCui
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