Laws as Magic
Laws are to the legal system what incantations are to magicians, they are a camouflage and a facade for the actual causes of an outcome. This is the secret that the powers-that-be in our legal system hide just as magicians hide the secrets of their tricks in order to keep and maintain their power. Unlike magic, however, this secret will and is destroying the integrity of the legal system. This is manifested by the fact that in order to exercise my right of Free Speech to write this essay that I must do so anonymously to avoid retribution from the protectors of Free Speech in the court system in which I practice.
Despite my varied experience in life going from a working class background to graduating from Harvard Law thanks to the G.I. Bill, I left law school with what I now know to be a naive belief that law involved a normative set of principles from which we logically deduce solutions to legal problems. Since graduating, I have worked as a trial attorney. It is here in the trenches of the legal system that allegedly different concepts of justice and interpretations of the law are tested, fought for and against, and victory or defeat suffered all within a framework of procedural rules making the legal battlefield equal for all who come before it and where intelligence, knowledge, and reason are the weapons.
What a bunch of nonsense. The parties in a case rarely care about the law or what is just. A party wants a certain result and that result must be just because they want it. The legal system responds with the sham that the parties' concept of justice is worked out and meshed into social ideals in our adversarial legal structure. This bogus response works for the rich parties and their lawyers. They go about generating huge amounts of paper, leaving no stone unturned, regardless of how relevant or material it is to a case, without worry of sanctions or retribution since there is no such thing as frivolous when you have the money to make anything seem possible and your desires can never be a waste of court resources.
However, for the politically powerless for whom this third branch of government is suppose to be a refuge, the last thing judges want an attorney to do for these clients is to adversarially argue anything. This makes them work and challenges their mystique of power. What really happens is that the judge quickly decides based upon their own bias, prejudices, and ethics how the case must end up and angles everything in that direction with the "law" as the veneer.
With any real world experience at all in representing uncelebrated cases and with any sense of honesty, a novice attorney quickly learns that what a lawyer must do is pretend to be an adversary. You must argue things up to a certain politically acceptable point so that the client thinks you care about the case without really challenging the latest pre-determined disposition, bias, and prejudices of the judge. This is just as true if not more so of so-called "liberal" judges because for them the law is equivalent to a religion and any attack upon it or the latest legal fad must immediately and forcefully require excommunication and suppression. The extremes that judges go to protect and hide this contradiction is inconceivable to the observer not familiar with the court system. Judges outright lie in decisions; appellate courts add further lies in order to affirm and not embarrass such a deceitful judge; judges overturn jury verdicts after weeks of trial simply because they did not like the result; appellate judges none of whom ever tried or could take to trial a case in their politically connected lives ignore such blatant disrespect for a jury by simply affirming without decision the reversal because they could not fabricate any justification for it; attorneys lose meritorious cases simply because they did not want to anger a judge by being adversarial; and judges dismiss meritorious cases simply because they did not like an adversarial attorney.
However, who would listen to such stories? Our entire judicial branch and ninety percent of our executive and legislative branch "lawmakers" are lawyers for whom the secret is the keystone of their power. They have no interest nor incentive to reveal the secret nor to ameliorate its effects. Though in reality, we are as dependent on the legal system as a person in the Middle Ages was dependent upon the Church, we Americans have this illusionary concept of ourselves as being wholly independent individuals who only need to be left alone by the legal system to survive and prosper. This is an illusion that is not shared by the rich and powerful who keep teams of lawyers on retainer to assure they keep their wealth and power.
Though this illusion is quickly erased when unfortunate circumstances result in one being involved in the legal system, it is then too late. My worst fear in court and the one that ferments the biggest contempt for its daily workings is that there is no one more in danger of being treated unjustly then a truly innocent defendant or a truly injured victim. Such clients honestly expect that the system simply by letting it work will protect them, wherein in reality it is they and their attorney who must be the most on guard of all. As with all previous legal systems, ours would willingly and knowingly sacrifice any individual to save its power. The only difference is that instead of destroying the individual physically our system destroys the spirit, which is much worse. How long can a legal system hypocritically claiming to be based on democratic principles survive when it keeps its power purely on hidden authoritarian principles?