October 14, 2004

The lawyers know too much.

But what do the lawyers know? The lawyers know language: how to slip into it and argue around and through it, how to chisel into words and wrench them open. The lawyers work inside a fictional text; they work with the words that form us. All our rights and obligations, all our freedoms and limits are worded, and the lawyers wield the words.

2 comments:

Clifford Duffy said...

The law works with a fiction that has real effects in the real word

Yer posting prompted this

"Paternity is a legal fiction" from Ulysses by J.J.

Natalie said...

"Legal fiction" is a term that comes up surprisingly often in various contexts in law classes.
I think the whole legal system stays in place through collective suspension of disbelief.