An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain the equality of all men. The trouble with the laws these days is that criminals know their rights better than their wrongs. Justice is incidental to law and order.Justice may be blind, but she has very sophisticated listening devices. Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility. Any society that needs disclaimers has too many lawyers. No man suffers injustice without learning, vaguely but surely, what justice is. I recently figured out that we have more than a million laws to enforce the Ten Commandments. I have never had a problem with drinking some beers but I have had problems with the police. There is plenty of law at the end of a nightstick. In the Halls of Justice, the only justice is in the halls.
Although the legal and ethical definitions of right are the antithesis of each other, most writers use them as synonyms. They confuse power with goodness, and mistake law and its fundamentals. If the laws could speak for themselves, they would complain of the lawyers in the first place. It is strange that men should take up crime when there are so many legal ways to be dishonest. Hunger makes a thief of any man. Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simple! See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. The more laws, the more offenders. Law is the only game where the best players get to sit on the bench. There is no sin if you crack a few laws now and then, just so long as you do not break any. Law never made men a whit more just. If you do not know there is a trampoline in the room, you are not going to dust the ceiling for prints. A lawsuit is a machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage. Thieves for their robbery have authority, when judges steal themselves.
