The Law is a Ass

Doctors are better writers than lawyers: Lewis Thomas, Perri Klass and Atul Gawande vs. John Grisham, Scott Turow and Lisa Scottoline. Why?
I think doctors have to be smarter, for one thing. But mainly the difference lies in the worlds they have to consider. Medicine draws upon the natural world: evolutionary biology, anatomy, chemistry, physics. The whole oyster, with its origins going back to the big bang. Law is a self-contained universe, created wholly by humans, mostly in the last five-hundred years, and nowhere older than five-thousand years. The law is a hothouse, designed to blunt the effect of the real world on its specimens.
Lawyers have their moments, of course: I’m thinking of Lincoln at Gettysburg. But today we have Scalia of Hattiesburg. The more recent the vintage of lawyer, the less likely he or she will be broadly schooled or widely read.
Lawyers, and the copy writers who blurb their books, embrace the conceit that they are expert observers of human nature. This is true only in the sense that sewage treatment workers are expert observers of water quality. Lawyers see only people locked in a struggle with others: their expert observations are overgeneralizations drawn from a data pool of the criminal, the greedy the bereaved, and very occasionally, the downtrodden.
Doctors, with some exceptions, treat the broad spectrum of humanity: the rich and poor, the broken and the whole. Doctors deal with the world first-hand: one can’t cure pneumonia by appealing to a jury’s emotions; beat a brain tumor on a technicality; nor appeal a fatal heart attack.
Finally, every time a lawyer wins a case, someone else loses. As a profession and an institution, the law can reinforce the worst in the human heart. Doctors, in contrast, aren’t engaged in a zero sum game: if the doctor wins, everybody wins. There is plenty wrong with medicine the way it is practiced in industrialized society, but it lends its practitioners, and authors, a more expansive view of the human condition than the one from the bar.

An Antidote to Family Circus

When you feel like shaking Bill Keane until he vomits treacle, check out Red Meat. Papa Moai will heap blessings on your stone head.
Courtesy of silvertide

The Story So Far

In his column in the Washington Post, Colbert I. King gives a succinct and chilling summary of our Iraq war, ending with this:

Afterward, Bush should close the doors, repair to a quiet place, and read from beginning to end Delaware Sen. Joe Biden’s speech Thursday before the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “Getting It Right in Iraq.”

Biden said: “Let me leave you with one thought. I come from Delaware. I have been to Dover many times. The men and women there who receive our soldiers and their families on that last long journey home know what this is about. When those planes fly over Delaware and land in the middle of the night, we are reminded that this is not about politics, about whether we believe with every fiber of our being that we are fundamentally right or that someone else is dangerously wrong. This is not about assigning blame or about partisanship. This is about that last journey home to Dover Air Base. It’s about those brave Americans who are doing everything in their power to get it right. We owe them no less than to get it right ourselves.”

The president should start handing out walking papers.