Judge Day tells us that justice on the streets is getting what you deserve: “…all great problems come from the streets. Do you know what the definition of justice is on the streets? You get what you deserve (80). Oddly, this definition of justice is her description for the code amongst lawyers: “…a lawyer will get even…that’s how the system retributes itself. It really does. How do they say it on the street? – ‘what you do comes back on you’” (75). This seems to suggest that lawyers are just as unruly, lawless, and disillusioned as those on the streets that must resort to this type of justice to fight for their nearsighted and selfish vision of liberty (“Everyone with a different sense of when the law should protect our liberty. Always…at the expense of someone else’s” (80).)

Presumably the cause of all this is the law, which after all (perhaps even more than politicians), exerts power on people’s minds. It would certainly make sense that it is the law that has made lawyers what they are. Lawyers’ schooling in the law, their dissecting and discerning it, has made them liars, full of double and triple-talk and spin. Lawyers do not know what is real or true anymore because lawyers are not real people: “Real people know what the real truth is!” (73). It is the law itself, as it is currently formulated, that is creating the problem. This is exemplified the battered woman, sentencing case that Judge Day must preside over the next day. Nine years minimum is intuitively wrong given the years of abuse, but that is the law. The law is unintuitive, powerful, and ultimately dehumanizing – because of it no one knows the real truth (certainly not lawyers) and thus no one is a real person. Moreover, in the eyes of the law, people are not people. Like the battered woman’s children, “They’re part of the record” (84).

The current law is the problem. What is the solution? We do not know but perhaps the narrator will find out. This is point of the novel, of his stories of constantly wandering, following various legal professionals, listening to them but himself remaining quiet. Judge Day reports that “The people who aren’t talking are looking – and when you’re looking, you’re either listening or your mind is wandering – God how the mind wanders!” (71). We are wandering with the narrator, looking for an answer but at times hopefully also listening. We’re listening for the clues to why the law is the way it is. The solution is clearly not in the courts, which don’t make law but just enforce it. That is some place the solution is not. Where it is, we’ll have to look harder to find: “’Why is the law the way it is…if you look hard enough you’ll find what you’re looking for. He also said, don’t count on the courts” (78).

-- AlexWang - 03 Apr 2012