Integrity and Jurisprudence
Perhaps a worse thing to do than to disobey the law is to abuse it. In claiming accident compensation, for example, it may be a worse crime to force your lawyer to look for loopholes in the law to accommodate your situation than to merely admit that your case does not have enough of a basis and should be dismissed. In other words, an honorable defeat is better than a qualified victory.
If this is true for claimants, then so much so for judges, the men who are constitutionally mandated to uphold the law. Unfortunately, some of them can be seen to be abusers of the law as well. Instead of looking for loopholes to accommodate a specific side, however, they do so in order to mask inherent and dark prejudices. That is to say, they abuse the law by using it as a mere varnish to cover up their most irrational stances.
This is infinitely worse than being remiss in studying the facts of the case altogether. The reason why is that it makes what is irrational appear as rational. It compounds bigotry with deceit. In the first case, pure and sheer indolence can account for the lack of action. In the other case, it is not indolence, but consistent activity, though aimed at the wrong end.
Double Standards
A way to abuse the law is by applying double standards when claiming accident compensation. By flitting between two hermeneutic traditions, the literal and the dispensational, depending on which approach will better serve our interests is really the highest proof of depravity and untrustworthiness.
These two traditions, if ever we want ourselves to be perceived as honest pleaders, must be kept separate as much as possible, if only because their governing attitudes towards the law is antagonistic. According to the first tradition, the law must be taken as it is, leaving little room for the imagination to supply an ultimate meaning or value or goal. The letter of the law has more authority than its spirit primarily because it is safer to follow that which many people can obviously see than that which they cannot. The spirit of the law, according to this view, if it really has any, is too dangerous a guide to follow because any judge who has enough training in logic and jurisprudence and pervert these sciences and take every law they encounter to mean whatever their prejudices dispose them to feel. The other tradition, on the other hand, balks at the literalist tradition because it reduces us to unintelligent obedience to the law. It arguers that more than simply reading what the law states, we should study what it means. Just because some judges can abuse this privilege should not mean that it should be abandoned altogether. Just because some people put poison in the food they cook should not mean that the whole science of cookery should be abandoned.
Combining these two fields to suit our purposes is a grave transgression, futile, and mendacious.
Perhaps a worse thing to do than to disobey the law is to abuse it. In claiming accident compensation, for example, it may be a worse crime to force your lawyer to look for loopholes in the law to accommodate your situation than to merely admit that your case does not have enough of a basis and should be dismissed. In other words, an honorable defeat is better than a qualified victory.
If this is true for claimants, then so much so for judges, the men who are constitutionally mandated to uphold the law. Unfortunately, some of them can be seen to be abusers of the law as well. Instead of looking for loopholes to accommodate a specific side, however, they do so in order to mask inherent and dark prejudices. That is to say, they abuse the law by using it as a mere varnish to cover up their most irrational stances.
This is infinitely worse than being remiss in studying the facts of the case altogether. The reason why is that it makes what is irrational appear as rational. It compounds bigotry with deceit. In the first case, pure and sheer indolence can account for the lack of action. In the other case, it is not indolence, but consistent activity, though aimed at the wrong end.
Double Standards
A way to abuse the law is by applying double standards when claiming accident compensation. By flitting between two hermeneutic traditions, the literal and the dispensational, depending on which approach will better serve our interests is really the highest proof of depravity and untrustworthiness.
These two traditions, if ever we want ourselves to be perceived as honest pleaders, must be kept separate as much as possible, if only because their governing attitudes towards the law is antagonistic. According to the first tradition, the law must be taken as it is, leaving little room for the imagination to supply an ultimate meaning or value or goal. The letter of the law has more authority than its spirit primarily because it is safer to follow that which many people can obviously see than that which they cannot. The spirit of the law, according to this view, if it really has any, is too dangerous a guide to follow because any judge who has enough training in logic and jurisprudence and pervert these sciences and take every law they encounter to mean whatever their prejudices dispose them to feel. The other tradition, on the other hand, balks at the literalist tradition because it reduces us to unintelligent obedience to the law. It arguers that more than simply reading what the law states, we should study what it means. Just because some judges can abuse this privilege should not mean that it should be abandoned altogether. Just because some people put poison in the food they cook should not mean that the whole science of cookery should be abandoned.
Combining these two fields to suit our purposes is a grave transgression, futile, and mendacious.
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