Well, it's actually the Chinese New Year today (Happy New Year!). But in my meandering readings for my major field syllabus I came across Leon Fink's discussion of a new holiday proclaimed by Eisenhower in 1958 in response to "a spirited campaign by the American Bar Association" (I guess they squeezed this in between not admitting black people and creating committees to expel communists). He proclaimed "Law Day" -- but it wasn't just any day. He made May Day, the traditional workers' holiday, into "Law Day." In the speech, he acknowledged that the two holidays and suggested that it was appropriate because law is the friend of the working class.
Excuse me, I just blacked out from typing that. Anyway, the proclamation also cited Edmund Burke in linking workers' welfare to law: "The poorest man may, in his cottage, bid defiance to all the forces of the crown...The storms may enter; the rains may enter -- but the King of England cannot enter: all his forces dare not cross the threshold of that ruined tenement!" To be fair, Ike did follow that with the comment that it's not really great for people to be living in ruined tenements at all, but as I spent my weekend writing a syllabus delineating the history of the rights in U.S. law, I remain cynical. Property rights equally serve rich and poor! Isn't it wonderful how equal we all are? I tend to agree with Marx (shocker) that rights are mostly just smoke and mirrors -- hence the theme of my syllabus: Rights are Crap (as a subtheme of my dissertation: Law is Crap).
I know, the response of 95% of the population is that we have to protect property rights because any day now they're going to become millionaires. Or they think their toothbrush and CD collection are the first things that will be appropriated after the revolution. That reminds me of a story one of my NYU professors told once, of an election in Jamaica in the late forties, when the JLP, in order to defeat the socialists who were gaining support in the countryside, hired the most well-known local "layabout" in each town. They hired these guys, not to shill for their party, but to go knock on the doors of various houses, pretending to work for the socialist party and holding a clipboard to do an inventory of the possessions in each house. Needless to say, the JLP won (that time, anyway).
Somehow I went from Law Day to a socialist rant. Oh, I can't pretend to be surprised. I've been rereading all of the most horrific cases from my years in law school for several days straight in order to write this syllabus. Law school supposedly makes some people more conservative -- it just made me more convinced that we are all deeply, deeply implicated in oppression and if there were a righteous rebellion a la Nat Turner by, say, the global enslaved population, there would be no injustice in us all being killed in our beds. Really, Law Day is every day. Wherever there's a four-year-old child with permanent brain damage from constant abuse, the law will be there to say the state had no affirmative duty to protect him. Wherever there's a white man who can't get his wife to pay him alimony, the law will be there to say that, finally, there's a real reason to have heightened scrutiny of gender classifications. And wherever there's an enslaved eight-year-old girl who was raped, the law will be there to say that there's no such crime as the rape of a black woman, of any age.
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Go Law? Oh wait, that was not a crescendo to delight. I have to say, law is crap. Before I went to Law School I could point at Brown v. Board of Education and the end of slavery and Title VII and think very positive things about the transformative potential of law. Now I feel somewhat differently....Needless to say, I concur in the Court's opinion that Law is crap. My dissertation shares your subject. A tentative title coul be Protecting Private Property and Helping out the Man: Law is Crap.
There must be a history somewhere that describes how capitalism integrated laborers into their own oppression and convinced them to aspire to (ever-illusive) advantages within that system. I need to find that book.
With this in mind, I couldn't help but recall that the US Constitution abolished property limits that were in place under the Articles of Confederation - which would have prohibited the vast accumulation of wealth by individuals. No wonder the elites who wrote it got rid of that clause pleanty fast.
Which brings me to another point (that we have disagreed upon in the past): that I think the Enlightenment was, overall, an improvement but that the benefits (like the idea that achieving some semblance of equality meant limiting an individual's liberty to acquire vast wealth) came with distinct disadvantages. And the struggle between these two inclinations is unending.
Finally (wheh), this was a great way to recognize Law Day! Can I nominate you to be the holiday's spokesperson?
Ha! Making me Law spokesman is like making me spokesman (somehow they both have to be "men") for the Enlightenment. Yeah, I still struggle with that -- I am so deeply captured by Enlightenment ideas even as I loathe many of their repercussions. My whole existence is built out of arguing against it using its own language. It is a worthy foe.
I envision Law Man as someone kind of like Mr. Peanut. Pale, male, and with a top hat indicating his uber-capitalist status. And quite cheery. Law Man is cheery as he stands on the broken necks of the enslaved.
And I cannot wait until we can just say "law is crap" (in fancier terms) in our work and footnote to each other. I think that is actually the secret of all academics in legitimizing their personal opinions. Footnotes to friends!
I am not feeling deeply captured by the Enlightenment today. I don't know why but I've lost that loving feeling. I am not sure whether teh enlightenment was an improvement because it replaced more cyclical non-linear ways of analytical thinking....The Enlightment brought us racialized slavery, a theory of property that discounted the claims of indigenous people and justified a genocide, and the Great Chain of Being right? I'm not sure someone like me can ever be deeply captured by the Enlightment - unless that capture involved being bound and place on a slave ship. I'm pretty sure that individualism and reason - which keep us warm and equal - have a lot to do with rendering unimagined inequalities and injuries. :)
Absolutely -- I'm the last person to argue that we should be grateful for the Enlightenment or that we are lucky it happened. But it did happen, and now the way we talk and argue and debate, like it or not, is framed by it, as you often point out. Perhaps deep capture is the wrong term to deploy, with all its corporate law associations...:)
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