law can justify anything

Indeed so, but that said, the factories where rulings in law are stamped out on an assembly-line basis, are still nothing but human workplaces. I have been in and out of more than enough courthouses, and pretty much prevailed one way or another every damn time, to know that how one carries oneself has as much to do with the outcome, as what the case being made against oneself consists of.

If you’ll pardon the seeming brutality (and to those of a religious persuasion, the blasphemy…), the Vietnam veterans used to have this saying that helped them get through the war and its horrors:

yea, though I walk through

The Valley of the Shadow of Death,

I will fear no evil

‘’cause I’m the meanest motherfucker in the valley.

Now then;

…one doesn’t have to say that, or even really mean it (probably best not to do either in a court of law), but just to WEAR it, a projected persona that says to all comers, “there will be consequences, wait and find out what if you don’t believe me, if you do wrong by me here today”, and you’d be surprised how damn well it works. It isn’t a threat, or an epithet, or even disrespectful to anyone or their position, to carry oneself as if one will see to one’s own interests, hell or high water notwithstanding.

Like a mad dog who backs off at a mere posture or tone of voice, it is astonishing how even judges and attorneys will alter their approach, to someone who simply is not afraid of them, nor of anything in their power to do.

It is the spirit of hesitant cowardice which urban, suburban and college-educated life breeds, above all else, that I take fierce and indefatigable issue with: once fear is made habitual and familiar among enough people, they can be made to do or endure or suffer anything, be it just or unjust.

But to the meanest, etc, in the valley, if there is any thinking twice to be done by anyone with power to harm anyone, it will be the ones who do not fear them regardless, who cause them to do so.

You’d be surprised how often this has served me, and in how many situations where that posture of conviction and nothing else was all I had to defend myself with.