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StandWhoseGround 3 - 28 Mar 2012 - Main.DavidFrydman
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| | Who serves to benefit from the Florida Stand Your Ground statute and others like it???
The Silver Lining | | | Why This Is Important To Our Class Discourse | |
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< | Early in the course, we were introduced to the concept that the law is a weak form of social control. This is a prime example of other forms of social control (namely corporate wealth and political lobbies) exerting their powerful influence to manipulate the weaker form of social control, the law, to further entrench their position of power in American society. | >
> | Early in the course, we were introduced to the concept that the law is a weak form of social control. In class yesterday, Eben posited that the beauty of the law grows out of this very weakness. I think my initial reaction--questioning the notion that a social force that operates with such extraordinary weakness can be "beautiful"--arose out of my desire to view beauty as a quality that imparts aesthetic pleasure on those who observe it. However, if the "beauty" of the law's weakness is in its capability to foster or protect injustice to such an extent that the public does not even want to come into contact with it, then the Trayvon Martin incident is a shining example of that beauty. To me, this seems like irony. Law is social force that we are taught to think is there for the protection of the public good; a reflection of the social and moral values of a society that operates to enforce and maintain those values. Coming into law school, I had fully bought into this understanding of the law. But even before taking this class, I began to see how flawed that understanding truly was. The courses we took during the first semester illuminated that the law did not develop in response to social values--as a reflection of what society wanted. Rather, the law has developed to its current state (and will continue to develop beyond this point into the future) not only as a result of the social forces colliding in each case, but also as a result of the judges' and lawyers' determinations of the implications and consequences those colliding social forces would have in a given context. The influence of organizations like ALEC and their supporters is just one of the forces colliding in the Trayvon Martin tragedy. But isn’t it ironic that the very notion that makes the law beautiful is also that which makes it look so ugly. | | | | |
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< | If the law can be so easily manipulated to attend to the desires and needs of other social actors, how can it still be effective in serving its primary, legitimate purposes such as protecting the public from harmful or criminal activity by individual actors? | >
> | But irony is beautiful too. Not beautiful in the sense that it imparts aesthetic, visual or emotional pleasure on the viewer. Irony is beautiful to the beholder first because she gets it. She is in on the joke. She feels at once affirmed in her own ability to recognize the ironic situation for its very irony. However, the beautiful irony of the law is the aspect of it that instills fear of it in the public. The law holds people not at all, yet it destroys lives left and right. | | | | |
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< | If it takes something like the tragic death of an innocent teen to expose the far-reaching influence of an organization like ALEC, what other forces of social control are operating their influence on the public without arousing our suspicions? What tragedy must occur to expose their influence as well? | >
> | The loss of Trayvon Martin’s life probably would not have been prevented even if Florida did not have a Stand Your Ground statute. George Zimmerman appears to be a man with a violent history living in a region with profound racial tensions. If he was ready to pull the trigger that night, I’m not sure that the presence of a different State self-defense statute was going to stop him. It is not the law that destroyed the life of Trayvon Martin. But the outrage over the non-arrest of Zimmerman has opened the eyes of much of the American public to ironic “beauty” of the law. A statute which was passed with the purpose of protecting the innocent man who is forced to defend himself is now being used to protect the morally and socially reprehensible acts of a killer. The public sees this, and recognizes yet another protection of injustice by the very social force that is supposed to be perpetuating justice. Instances like this—although most are on a much smaller scale—are exactly why the law is enormously feared, even though there is “nothing to it.” | | | |
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