Self-Evidence
I have an egomaniacal tendency to believe that Scott Greenfield is speaking to me in many of his blog posts. No doubt that’s partly because, as a highly-accomplished criminal defense attorney, so much of what he says is highly relevant to people like me who aspire to become highly-accomplished criminal defense attorneys.
Whether or not Scott had me in mind when he wrote his post today titled The Walmart Lode, it harmonizes with his side of our exchange in the comment thread to my post here suggesting that barriers to the legal profession should be lowered rather than raised. Scott writes in his post today:
There’s a pretense we all hold that we are the norm, that whatever thoughts flow through our heads are the ones shared by ordinary, rational people of good will and intention. We believe in our own thoughts, and we believe that most people, the normal ones, share them. We are deluding ourselves.
As rational as we wish to believe ourselves to be, the same is true of most everyone else. Except we all disagree. Every single one of us. We may share a few thoughts, overlap from time to time, but we also harbor thoughts that others believe to be absurdly wrong. Maybe even dangerous. Except we don’t know it and refuse to acknowledge it.
This is a very astute observation, and one that we all would do well to carefully consider lest we be deluded to the detriment of ourselves or others. For example, in a recent criminal case I found it hard to imagine how the jury could fail to give my client the benefit of the doubt to which he was entitled and to recognize that he reasonably feared for his life when two angry men armed with guns invaded his backyard. Turns out the jury didn’t see what seemed so obvious to me after all. Some of us hope that if only judges would stop preventing juries from being informed about their right to nullify unjust laws and about the criminal penalties following a conviction, then unjust laws like those criminalizing marijuana possession would become unenforceable, and juries would refuse to convict defendants of certain crimes to which draconian mandatory minimum sentences are attached. But until the wider society from which jury pools are drawn cares more than they apparently do about liberty, this may be a forlorn hope.
In my partial defense (Scott’s post addresses “every single one of us”), though, I do know and acknowledge that many of the people who come across the thoughts I express here on this blog will believe them to be “absurdly wrong,” and “maybe even dangerous.” After all, an avowed purpose of this blog is to do my small part to de-mythologize and de-legitimize the State. That’s not exactly mainstream. Although what I advocate is not the violent but the peaceful and intellectual and incremental overthrow of the State (which I don’t expect to be completed in my lifetime if ever), no doubt many will believe the ideas themselves to be anathema if not treasonous. Probably many will be so turned off by such ideas that they won’t even give them or this blog or me the time of day, although I try half-heartedly to make the ideas as palatable as possible. But I think that this project of de-mythologizing and de-legitimizing the State is part and parcel of fostering among people that “spirit of liberty” about which Judge Learned Hand spoke so eloquently. And this “spirit of liberty,” in turn, is essential to criminal justice.
Ironically, I arrived at my far-out political opinions as a result of a lifetime populist desire to understand and delve deeper into the common perennial wisdom that guides and undergirds the society in which I live. I see that populist desire behind my early (though ultimately abandoned) intention to attend St. John’s College, my enlistment in the U.S. Navy, my conversion to Roman Catholicism and later to Quakerism. My downfall into philosophical anarchism, if downfall it is, I blame proximately on a closer consideration and study of the history of the American Revolution and of the Declaration of Independence and of what they meant. What exactly, I asked, is this “consent of the governed” from which government derives its just powers?
Although many of my posts on this blog are shot through with philosophical anarchism, I haven’t neglected entirely less philosophical arguments. I hope I haven’t forgotten, e.g., how to argue precedent. Most Americans profess admiration for the principles espoused in the Declaration of Independence. Progress can be made, in spite of the seemingly intractable difficulties Scott identifies, if people can be shown that some things they think they believe are inconsistent with or contradict other things they think they believe.
Because this blawg, in the spirit of blawging, tries to discuss current events from the viewpoint of the author without getting bogged down in timeless philosophical ruminations, some of my more radical assertions may strike the reader as unexamined and unsupported assumptions. Here are a few of the sources I’ve examined and carefully reflected upon to arrive at these more radical opinions:
The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, by Lysander Spooner
Our Enemy, the State, by Albert Jay Nock
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