Laws

Even before I took up the study of law, I was aware that people have quite varying views about how law is supposed to work. By which I do not mean people necessarily think that specific laws are different. It is more a meta thing, or perhaps since meta is an "after", it is more a prior thing.

One might think of how different people think the Constitution of the United States, for example, should be interpreted and applied. Since even members of the Supreme Court, the highest judges of the land in this matter, can and do disagree, it is no surprise that the rest of us get tangled up.

I heard a joke once upon a whenever about how different peoples and cultures view the law:

For the French, everything is permitted except what is expressly forbidden by law.
For the Germans, everything is prohibited except what is expressly permitted by law.
For the Russians, everything is forbidden even if it is permitted.
For the Italians, everything is permitted, especially if it is prohibited.

Amusing, but a more important distinction lies in those who consider law to designate an ideal toward which one aims -- married people ought not get divorced [but many will] -- and those who consider law a minimum which must be met -- married people cannot be allowed to get divorced [and none of them can.] I chose divorce because, despite its long history as something theoretically strictly prohibited and practically rarely allowed in western Christian culture, that has shifted radically even within my own lifetime.

Surely few people would say that divorce is a desirable outcome for couples getting married -- be they same sex couples or heterosexual couples -- but almost none can deny that divorce is a likely outcome or expect that the legal system should place divorce beyond the reach of those who desire it. Having begun my own work in the law as a legal assistant in a family law office that mainly dealt in divorce, I know that the legal system does not make it easy to get a divorce, although it is a breeze compared to what it once was.

My Talmudic studies, muddied though they are in memory today, made me realize that my own religious tradition, which is frequently appealed to by reactionary politicians, has a nuanced vision of how to apply the law. It is amazing to me how few of those who seem determined to make the Bible (their Bible, that is, which is not my Bible) the law of this land have so little knowledge of how the people who first received that law (or conceived it) have interpreted it through the millennia.