Law, law, and more law
Today I was going to write yet another post on the SPLC case – I have a lot more to say. But I decided to postpone it, probably till tomorrow, because you know what? I got tired of writing about law, law, law. Two posts on law already today.
I was not fond of law school. Every now and then an issue would grab my interest, but a great deal of it was boring and nitpicky and so there’s a reason I never went into the law business afterward. If you had told me that lo these many years later I’d be writing about law on a near-daily basis, voluntarily, I would have laughed in your face.
And yet here we are.
My daughter is the 4th generation physician sharing the lineal family name, Her father, uncle, grandfather and great-grandfather all are/were MDs. My youngest broke that mold for the law, is happy in his work and productive. Although still young, fellow attorneys his senior consult him on points of legal strategy and understanding.
I am damn proud and happy for him; he broke the medical mold!
My mother’s dream was for me to go to law school. Now that I’m in the real world and see what lawyers actually do, I thank the lord I never went to law school.
AesopSpouse took his BA in History, as he wanted to go to law school and consider the weightier matters of the law (I think I’ve told y’all before that we met in college theater productions, and he once played Sir Thomas More), but after being awarded his Juris Doctor, he discovered he didn’t much like working with lawyers.
So he went back to school after a couple of years, got another BS in Mechanical Engineering, and ended up as a patent attorney.
He’s the only lawyer I know who was given the third degree.
I guess this little post is more about studying law, than it is about the SPLC, but allow me to address the latter.
There is the general matter that “charities” operate in the US under various guises, in particular, their legal frameworks. Usually, these legal frameworks are, IMHO, lax or very lax, in terms of guaranteeing their legitimacy. The SPLC operates under the federal guise of a 501(c)(3). Previously, on this blog, there was a little discussion about whether funneling money through shell, or shell-like entities, was a prosecutable crime of fraud.
Now I don’t have the expertise on this topic generally, or a detailed knowledge of what a 501(c)(3) requires. But shouldn’t a CHARITY in the 501(c)(3) basket have strong requirements that it does NOT engage in this type of subterfuge?
In the alternative, we might study either (or both) Plato’s Laws or Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, just as a hobby, mind.
AesopFan:
I have a relative who ended up the same but in the opposite order: an engineer who later went to law school and became – you guessed it – a patent attorney.
We could talk about Nature’s Law, or Natural Law, although to be honest, I am not quite sure just what that means. It may not mean the same thing as the Laws of Nature (or the laws of physics, or the laws of thermodynamics, or Ohm’s Law, etc. )
When people do talk about Natural Law or Natural Rights, they often neglect to consider the roles of evolution, evolutionary psychology, or neuroscience. It becomes a subset of philosophy, which in turn also tends to add in elements of culture, which clearly vary from society to society. [It is late so I will skip an exercise to try to define which of our constitutional rights have a basis in our nature and most of the others that are based on legal theory and cultural experience.]
I suspect the better lawyers are also the ones who matriculated before, during, or after law school, at the school of hard knocks.
But really we ought to be considering means to mandate that ALL laws have a sunset to automatically and distinctly end their ineffectiveness at addressing their original goal if or when that happens. We have too many laws on the books, and a famous admittance that we are likely to be violating some federal law because of this excess and our ignorance.
The need to renew any given expired (or potentially expiring) law would (or should) force an evaluation of just how effective it really has been, or if changes and updates are also needed.
Off topic, but I recall an earlier comment discussion about the sum of the sequence of odd numbers always being a square. This morning I noticed a visual proof of that result. Start with an bunch of equilateral triangles of area 1. Now stack them to make a larger equilateral triangle. You start with one triangle, the next row has three triangles, the next five, and so on. The next row is just the preceding row flipped over with two triangles added at the ends, so the odd number sequence continues. What is the area of the larger triangle? It is a scaling problem, add n rows, the area increases by n squared. Voila.