'He, on the contrary, who is told that, "to do justice is to obey the
law," has to inquire, not what is justice! but, what is the law? Now
to know the law, (were it practicable!) would be not only to know
the statutes at large by rote, but all the precedents, and all the
legal discussions and litigations, to which the practitioners of law
appeal! Innumerable volumes, filled with innumerable subtleties and
incoherencies, and written in a barbarous and unintelligible jargon,
must be studied! Memory is utterly inadequate to the task; and reason
revolts, spurns at and turns from it with loathing.
'A short statement of facts will, in my opinion, demonstrate that law,
in its origin and essence, is absolutely unjust.
'To make a law is to make a rule, by which a certain class of future
events shall be judged.
'Future events can only be partially and imperfectly foreseen.
'Consequently, the law must be partial and imperfect.
'Let us take the facts in another point of view--The law never varies.
'The cases never agree.
'The law is general.
'The case is individual.
'The penalty of the law is uniform.
'The justice or injustice of the case is continually different.
'To prejudge any case, that is, to give a decided opinion on it while
any of the circumstances remain unknown, is unjust even to a proverb.
Yet this is precisely what is done, by making a law.'
'This is strange doctrine, Mr. Turl!'
'Disprove the facts, Mr. Trevor. They are indisputable; and on them
the following syllogism may indisputably be formed.
'To make a law is publicly to countenance and promote injustice.
'Publicly to countenance and promote injustice is a most odious and
pernicious action.
'Consequently, to make a law is a most odious and pernicious action.
'How unlimited are the moral mischiefs that result! To make positive
laws is to turn the mind from the inquiry into what is just, and
compel it to inquire what is law!
'To make positive laws is to habituate and reconcile the mind to
injustice, by stamping injustice with public approbation!
'To make positive laws is to deaden the mind to that constant and
lively sense of what is just and unjust, to which it must otherwise be
invariably awake, by not only encouraging but by obliging it to have
recourse to rules founded in falsehood!
'Each case is law to itself: that is, each case ought to be decided by
the justice, or the injustice arising out of the circumstances of that
individual case; and by no other case or law whatever; for the reason
I have already given, that there never were nor ever can be two cases
that were not different from each other.
'I therefore once more warn you, Mr. Trevor, that law is a pernicious
mass of errors; and that the practitioners of it can only thrive by
the mischiefs which they themselves produce, the falsehoods they
propagate, and the miseries they inflict!'
'This would be dangerous doctrine to the preacher, were it heard in
Westminster hall.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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