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December, 2005



Legal Crimes

by Frank Scott


"It is better to suffer a great wrong than to have recourse
to the much greater wrong of the law."
--Charles Dickens


We are taught to be proud that we are a nation of laws, and that no one
is above the law, no matter how much wealth or power that person may
possess. While there are occasional examples of this equality , exalted
by those who make the laws and benefit most from them, the opposite is
far more true for the general population. The more money and power you
have, the more law works for you; the less money and power, the more
bamboozled you are kept to believe in this equality.

Concern over the selection of new supreme court justices is valid, but
too much stress on laws and the people who rationalize them, and too
little on the systems they reinforce has helped create a severely
limited democracy in which wealth and power are permanently kept in
minority hands, in hopes they will be benevolent in dispensing this
power. Sure.

The origins of western law are found in biblical mythology; Moses went
up the hill, not to fetch a pail of water, but to come down with god’s
laws for the faithful. Like much mythology, this fable is a version of
material reality which lives on, in that laws still come from above, and
filter down to common folk through middle men of a priesthood. Whether
those priests are employed by a church , a court or a corporation, they
still work for a ruling class.

The language of the law is almost completely foreign and even
unintelligible to the majority under its control. It is poetry to its
writers and their employers, since it works for the maintenance of
systems which empower rich minorities and enable them to keep that power .

Whether supreme court justices are liberal or conservative , they serve
to protect property and wealth, even though most people have neither. In
this, they are no different from the other two branches of government.
Trying to balance the potential inherent in our fabled separation of
powers is an admirable, if still mostly theoretical aspect of our
system. The supreme court’s job is to rubber stamp the laws that make
the system supreme, even if in the process it sometimes benefits a
minority that may not be rich, but is certainly powerful enough to have
some clout at the court .

Until a democratic majority can control the minority power of wealth,
praising the law and enforcing the legality of our system is sanctifying
the status quo. Given the dangerous state of material reality, that is
the problem, not the solution.

When the recently deceased Rosa Parks was lauded for displaying the
power of the individual , this was more legal mythology employed to
reinforce and not really challenge entrenched power. Parks was a
wonderful woman but she was a skilled, militant activist, representing
not herself but a group just waiting to challenge ugly racism in court.
She, they, and we, won the case, and overt apartheid ended. But racism
continues, sometimes blatant and often bloody, because having an active
and financially capable minority bring about change on the law books
merely serves to maintain the system that still thrives on institutional
racism, while frowning on the individual kind. But it is the social
force that must be confronted, and won't be as long as we venerate the
laws of institutions which represent anything but a majority of the people.

Continued reliance on courts and lawyers to solve deeply rooted social
problems can make life better for the small groups which can afford the
protections of those laws. But legal strengthening of a system which
depends and feeds on inequality does nothing to change its substantial
reality. Our democracy remains a work in progress, but it won’t reach
fruition until we examine its origins , coming from those who could
legislate freedom while they owned slaves, and exclude more than half of
humanity - women -from their democratic theory.

The founders of our democratic faith represented the landed gentry,
whose laws were designed first and foremost to insure their powers of
property ownership . The same was true in ancient Greece, a slave
society which enabled philosophers to ponder life’s meaning for their
employers , while others did the work to make life possible. And it was
true in ancient biblical mythology, in which the fable of Moses merely
indicates that the rulers ruled with power reinforced by the deity. We
still pledge such faith in our modern courtrooms.

Present legislation around issues like crimes of hate or war are
dangerous examples of how law can be used to obscure larger reality.
Defining specific acts of individual hate or war as criminal means that
all other aspects of hate and war are legal. We criminally charge
individuals for personal hating , but leave untouched the social,
religious and political foundation of hatred . In the same way,
individual warriors are tried for crimes, while the mass murders of war
and the governments which conduct it remain unquestioned.

Such laws may insure the power of material wealth and its lawyers , but
they do nothing to heal deep social wounds or solve menacing social
problems. They simply reinforce the power of those most responsible for
inflicting those wounds and creating those problems.

Democracy and law may someday be synonyms, but presently, they are more
often antonyms. Laws are made primarily by and for the powerful, in
order to govern and control the powerless. Principled concern over who
serves on the court is understandable, and even necessary. But it should
be second to a primary concern over whose interests the court really
serves .


Copyright (c) 2005 by Frank Scott. All rights reserved.

This text may be used and shared in accordance with the
fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be
archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that
the author is notified and no fee is charged for access.
Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on
other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author

frank scott
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(415)457 2415 cell (415) 847 4105