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, if the stacked triangle has n rows, the area increases by n squared. Voila.
Chuck: I’d never thought of it that way, but I knew that to get from one square to the next, you add that number plus the next one (e.g. 49 = 36 + (6+7)). The “proof” is simply that (n+1)^2 = n^2 + n + n + 1.
Jimmy: that was already done in the old thread, I just happened to see a house of cards this morning and it struck me. I am sure the visual proof is well known, but I had never seen it. Scaling struck me as a neat argument as opposed to induction.
@ R2L >”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 owhen 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.”
President Trump 45 made a big show of that very thing, and IIRC a pretty decent start on removing outdated or ineffective (or Democrat favoring) regulations within his power as Chief Executive.
Another reason the Deep State had to shut him down: they LIKE it when
someone that they want to prosecute/persecute “commits three felonies a day.”
https://fee.org/articles/three-felonies-a-day-how-the-feds-target-the-innocent/
The now-iconic 2010 book by Civil libertarian attorney Harvey Silverglate gives examples from both parties of overzealous prosecutors.
If you have a big enough rule book, anyone can aspire to imitate Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s head of the secret police, who bragged, “Show me the man, and I will find you the crime.”
@R2L, AesopFan: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 owhen that happens.
It is a good idea, but I think there is a practical barrier that there is a huge fraction of the laws that no one is ever going to want to sunset, for example laws against murder and things like that. Because there’s so many of them, there will be some process built that lets you grandfather laws in or batch process the renewal of the sunset provision, and that process will certainly be gamed and abused.
It’s really difficult to restrain a legislature from something it really wants to do. We’ve tried that, of course, and have had some success with the US Constitution. I think a different method of selecting legislators, so that they are closer to being ordinary citizens and not career politicians, would get us closer to being able to effectively sunset laws without perverting the intent, and probably would fix some other problems as well.
As long we’re waving magic wands anyway, that is. You can’t require that all laws sunset without amending the Constitution and you can’t change how people get elected without amending the Constitution. The sort of collapse that results in the US Constitution being replaced by something else is probably not going to favor the establishment of what we think of as “good government”.
In the end, pieces of paper do not protect us. It all comes down to the people in charge abiding by what the pieces of paper say. If you have any doubts, refer to the Soviet Union’s constitution or China’s and review the rights people have on paper vs the rights they have in reality. Excerpt below:
neo: “… the law business ;;;”
LOL. I have long thought it was a turning point when they started allowing lawyers to advertise. Before that they were “officers of the court”. After, it was clear they were in it for the bucks. Not that they weren’t before but at least there may have been a sense of shame. Ok maybe a little …
It was a scandal when the first ads appeared on the early internet. I asked Grok:
Yes, it was lawyers.
I thought it was earlier than that when advertising by lawyers was first allowed, it was probably on a state-by-state basis. It may have taken some time for it to be, uh, “weaponized”.
Niketas Choniates on April 24, 2026 at 2:50 pm:
Yes, my comment is probably mostly a magic wand gesture. 🙁
” … fraction of the laws that no one is ever going to want to sunset, [then maybe they deserve and can justify a sunset period of over 30 to 50 years? vs. a more usual 15 to 20?] for example laws against murder and things like that. Because there’s so many of them,…” [which of course provides an opportunity to consolidate some/many of them, plus adjust punishments in line with Art Deco’s past suggestions?]
“… It’s really difficult to restrain a legislature from something it really wants to do.” Yes, Madison’s angels, and all that 🙂 Or make it do something it really does not want to do, such as pass the Saves Act, even given Neo’s recent cautions on the difficulty of doing that under present circumstances.
” I think a different method of selecting legislators, so that they are closer to being ordinary citizens and not career politicians, would get us closer to being able to effectively sunset laws without perverting the intent, and probably would fix some other problems as well.” Yes, probably an essential element of all this. I have proposed alternatives for supermajority based term limits in the past. Finding a “solution” to avoid abuses of the Gerrymandering/ redistricting problem is another. But our founders understood human nature well enough to know that public virtue had to be preceded by private virtue in enough citizens to be able to also obtain that virtue in our representatives and judiciary. Has the march through the institutions and the indoctrination via the educational system really been THAT impactful on our communal virtue, or just on enough of the population (40%?) to impact wise (and serious) governance?
On “You can’t require that all laws sunset without amending the Constitution and you can’t change how people get elected without amending the Constitution.” My initial reaction was “that can’t be right, as we could pass laws controlling the need for sunsets, etc.” But I agree if you meant that for us to force or mandate sunsetting, then a constitutional change is probably necessary. Your past comments about the filibuster show how “flexible” our congress critters can be when it suits their purposes. On the mode of changing elections, were you thinking of the 17th Amendment or similar, or that the states control the details anyway, or ??
Did our parents, grandparents, and great grandparents feel as abused by the government and the politicians as we do? Progressivism started around the time my grandparents were born, but Marxism preceded even that. Yet in the main our antecedents proved Marxism to be wrong on history and human nature in the main. They worked through some rough problems of labor strife and child labor, women’s suffrage, etc., plus two major wars. I hope our generations are still able to rise to the occasion and return us to a rational and serious country again.
I blow hot and cold on that optimism, but I am bolstered by the posts and commentary here.