I'm not dead yet, nobody is actually. Next week looks to be a little busier, with some extra reading and a couple short writing assignments, but 1L has still been entirely reasonable in its demands.

One word we have yet to hear meaningfully intoned is 'justice'. Not that I came to indulge some (in my case nonexistent) ideal about justice. But even the name of law school draws the distinction: though we'd probably all say that one of the highest ideals of the legal system is implementing "justice", we're not going to "justice school".

I took the most popular undergrad course at Harvard, called Justice, wherein a government professor occupied 15 weeks lecturing about various philosophical concepts of justice through history. As you can tell a lot of it stayed with me.

The various court opinions we've read so far will talk about "fairness" and considerations of morals and social policy but they stay far away from the J-word.

I think the answer is hidden in plain view: the legal system may produce justice as a side effect, but it is not (and could not be) designed to do so. For instance, civil procedure is described by the teacher as a means of dispute resolution -- not a means of producing justice in disputes.

And maybe "resolution" contains the clue: what law provides is solutions. One thing I'm gratified by is how concrete legal education is: there's no hundreds of pages of theory occasionally punctuated by a case that happens to illustrate some ideal behavior. The textbooks are built around the history of actual cases, actual opinions, actual mistakes, actual resolutions.

And what you quickly see is that part of the nature of law is that it's full of holes, some small, some large. Cases roll into those holes and humans have to kind of tow them out of the ditch using logic and common sense and other reasonable but fallible faculties of judgment.

Indeed, part of a successful judicial opinion is that it fills as few holes as needed to resolve the case, and leaves the rest open to another day -- so they can be addressed under the practical requirements of a future case, and not solved as some kind of thought experiment in the present.

10 Sep 04