The Law Always Falls Short
My story on why the law cannot live up to its own promise
I was 18 years old and it was about time to decide what I wanted to do with my life. What I didn’t know back then was, how wrong even that question would turn out to be. I kind of wanted to go to university, but no adequate field of study spoke to me, except for I was always a fan of the ancient Egypt. Archeology came to mind, but my family and advisors told me that there was no money in it and I should pick something more prosperous. Business, I thought, naahh. Medicine, naahh, I could never do 24 hour shifts.
Then, one movie night with my then boyfriend, we were watching a film about a small town girl going to law school and this hit home. How could I have not thought about this before. Justice and being fair, reliable and reponsible to one another was also something I was passionate about. I could never stand other kids being bullied or treated unfairly in school and I myself got my fair share of injustice too, so this was finally something that ignited a spark. Learn what is right and wrong. I should only realise very much later in life that my soul’s true passion was still ancient cultures, archeology, lost mysteries, and wise fables, indigenous cultures would tell at the campfire. Law was the second choice, the compromise.
Happy to accidentally overlap as well with a prestigious profession my parents would approve of, off I went, forgetting about everything else. Although the studies were mainly interesting, pondering on how my job life would look like in a very short time, made me shrink inside: wear professional clothing, be very well groomed and manicured, be mannered, don’t swear (and I admit it right away: I f*ing love swearing; please don’t lapidate me in the comments), have an office in a sanitary glass building in the city center where I would drive to with my smooth BMW from my picket-fenced house in the suburbs. Nausea. Still I followed the path, tried to get a designer handbag to get in the circle, but I never felt like one of them.
And not only that practicing law has always fallen short to named ancient studies, I got more and more aware that law even always falls short to what you might consider fair and just from a human perspective. And you would understand this too, without studying law, just by considering how law is made. There are social habits, norms or opinions that eventually rise up to the political parties. These opinions then are translated into legal text, discussed by parliament with its differing views representing millions of people, redacted, amended, and finally become generally applicable. As the cultural opinions change, the law follows, mostly with a huge time gap. It is the absolute exception that law innovates.
And most of the time, law will only comprise the content those politicians could all agree on. The lowest common denominator. And this means that many circumstances that occur in life are not even included. And that must make it unfair, already just by being incomplete.
For example: in the country I live in, landlords may keep the deposit from your rental apartment for 6–12 months after you moved out. This is mostly a lower 4 digit number. But imagine an older person being sick and moving out to a hospice and needing every penny to allow for their own death with some dignity. The heirs would get the deposit probably only after the person’s death. Or the single mother who moves out for financial reasons and to a smaller apartment. They don’t have any right to claim the deposit earlier, even if there were no defects in the apartment or anticipated further costs. This may cost her kid the school outing.
There is nothing I can do to make this right for these people, except for giving them an interest-free loan out of my law-firm-pocket. And this eats me alive.
The law is never to change the heart.
It is to restrain the heartless.
(Martin Luther King Jr.)
The promise of the law of contributing to a fair world has never and can never live up to the reality of a humane co-existence with neigbors. So, not only did law fall short for me personally, but it must always fall short to create social peace.
I have since moved out of practicing law and my soul does not allow for a comeback. I am up to setting-up a non-profit that fills in the injustice gap of the law, like the one I outlined. I want be giving those micro credits to people who cannot afford to wait for the landlord to be gracious enough to pay back the deposit. And I will continue to fill gaps of the law. And I will not be silent about this. Before anyone begs to their landlord or anyone for basic human decency, they may come to me. Follow to see, how its going and for more stories on how and why to do things differently from the cookie-cutter-approach, that spreads like wildfire in today’s society.
