Law in Contemporary Society

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HelenMayerFirstPaper 3 - 26 Mar 2009 - Main.IanSullivan
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  Admittedly, this is a discouraging portrait of how our laws are written. And in focusing on the public’s role in encouraging a “fix” I have not touched on the undercurrent of competing interests that lurk just below the surface. This is not to say I do not recognize the existence of that element as well. Indeed, when all the check-writing attendees at a fundraiser with John Murtha, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Defense Appropriations, attach business cards from Boeing, Lockheed and Northrup Grumman these players are brought into stark relief. I focus on other parts of the play because I often find that this class elicits a deceptively simple question in each context we discuss: which is more effective – changing the script from the outside or acting out the script from the inside with different goals in mind?

To my mind, working from the inside has a slight edge. Fear is a powerful human emotion, and fear of uncertainly is especially so. I mention this not only to recognize the difficulty of altering this aspect of the human psyche, but also because humans use magic not just to explain areas we are uncomfortable dealing with, such as death, but also to assuage our doubts in contexts where conquering uncertainty and finding the “truth” is impossible because it is inherently subjective. A trial is such a context. If the facts we allow a jury to hear are ultimately subjective, we cannot say whether the rules of evidence as they stand are “right” or “wrong." We can only say whether we think a change into the rules will get us to an outcome we believe is just more often than the rules would without it. I believe political solutions fall into this latter category. To take an example from class, when we pass a law such as the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, we should evaluate the move by asking whether, given that it is funded with a cigarette tax increase, it will further our values on the whole. We should evaluate our laws with this metric in mind, rather than the more comforting but ultimately cyclical goal of curing uncertainty in the public mind.

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  • This essay is very strong for three quarters, but it wanders a little towards the end. I think you could strengthen it by tightening structure: rewrite the first paragraph to state the thesis, the idea you are explicating, and tie that tightly to the conclusion you arrive at. If you mean to adopt the point of view stated in the present last paragraph, that the result of all trials is the consequence of uncertain exposure to subjective accounts impossible of producing certainty as to facts, you would need to ask how a much larger, fuzzier and more influenceable process such as legislation could ever produce laws tightly correlated to the intended social result. It's the very possibility that the truth about complex social occurrences can be descried that makes modern legislative process worth pursuing, as you say. So I think some relatively precise but unsparing editing is called for, and then I think you will have an excellent work to show for the effort.
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Revision 3r3 - 26 Mar 2009 - 22:17:08 - IanSullivan
Revision 2r2 - 28 Feb 2009 - 18:18:32 - HelenMayer
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