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Law in Contemporary Society
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It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.
White noise-- By MinChoi - 16 Feb 2012 "Criminal law appears to say parents have no right to kill their children. The law also, however, has from time to time mitigated murder to manslaughter where the perpetrator was an immigrant from a country with different criminal standards by which the perpetrators' acts were accepted customs." Before the onslaught of confusion - but I thought ignorance is not an excuse? Isn’t the law supposed to protect the weak and helpless? You mean just because some person is abused in her home country, it’s understandable for her to be abused here too? Is this the way lawyers think? But I thought this was America, why do we apply the reasonable person standard of a different country? – let’s try again: "Criminal law, or to be more concrete, courts, or even more concretely, judges have held that parents have no right to kill their children. Some other judges, however, have from time to time mitigated murder to manslaughter when the perpetrator was an immigrant from a country with different criminal standards by which the perpetrators' acts were accepted customs." English has many words of abstraction. They help users of that language to refer to complex ideas – rights, justice, equality, fairness. But do these abstractions help the thinking man or, to be politically correct, thinking person? Do they enhance or aid the thinking person’s “ability to understand sound principles and the free will to follow them”? Or do they muddle our (purportedly logical) line of thought with their vague definitions? Are they mere transcendental nonsense, grand words that mean who knows what but incites vague impressions of learnedness that judges throw around as justifications for the conclusions? Just like the sentence you've read just now? The thinking person should be able to see through the boggle of words, see them for what they are. But wouldn’t it be so much easier to think when we know what we are talking about? By replacing abstractions with concrete words grounded in facts, we offer a clearer description of our profession. It is not some amorphous, omnipresent deity we have sworn to worship called the law moving people around. It is in fact people, for one reason or another, that have a notion of what they feel the outcome should be – then try to explain why they feel that way using words no one can define quite well: justice, morality, fairness. So instead of asking why the law does do this instead of doing that, we'd ask why people do this or that. And ask why they're using all these abstractions. By using abstractions, we become conjurers of legal magic, perpetrating justifications that you and I and almost everyone realize means something else for each of us. Or we become puppets in the hocus pocus show, feigning to comprehend the legal lingo. ... but why won't we admit we don't know what we're talking about? Legal writing, from what I've heard, has moved toward clarity and straightforwardness. Why not clarify the substance as well as the style? I'd like to see what practicing the amorphous blob we call the "law" is, stripped bare of all its abstraction and reduced to concrete terms. A start would be to see how it is described.You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
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