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Beasts of the Law

-- By VendarrylJenkins - 01 Mar 2018

What Makes Law Essential

An essential question for anyone that undertakes the pursuit of legal study is, what is the purpose of the law? Most arrive at the common utilitarian explanation. The law is a tool to promote the greatest societal good as a body of rules that effectuate justice and equality. In fact, Maxwell Anderson went so far as to say that, “without law men are beasts.”

The Law's cure is a greater social evil

Yet, the contention that law is a utilitarian tool that promotes the greatest amount of good, fails as one examines the current state of incarceration for many of the most at risk members of the community in the United States. The explosion of the percentage of African Americans behind bars is a result of a campaign labeled the War on Drugs. It pushed severe sentencing for both using and selling drugs. The effort was an attempt to thwart the drug epidemic that many argued was ripping through urban minority communities with dangerous addiction. The aim was an obvious societal good. However, the true result has been the incarceration of nearly one in every four Black men. It is impossible to reconcile the theory that law is a utilitarian tool when it has been used to bring about an even greater evil than the evil it was meant to cure. Law cannot be both a system that brings about the most good, yet also be a system that promotes oppression, degradation, and inequality. This points to a fundamental contradiction in the purpose of the law, and how it interacts with our reality.

The Law Betrays our Innate Beastly Inclinations

A common result of the law has been the disenfranchisement of a significant number of Black Americans, numbering in the millions. The disenfranchisement obfuscates the most basic principles of freedom and democracy, traded away to promote a drug free America. The law is a system that has found fit to hold captive the most fundamental aspects of human society, freedom and enfranchisement, and traded them away for the basic aim to prevent drug usage. Trading high ideals and rights, for basic aims is surely a signifier of the beast that still lurks within a society ruled by law. It demonstrates an inability to leverage proper deterrent techniques and underscores the innate beast, which would defer to draconian measures.

So perhaps it would be better stated that the law allows men to be beasts without remorse; it criminalizes behavior that one can easily point to as a social ill and then allows dramatic and cruel forms of punishment for such acts. The law allows each of us to look outward, rather do any sort of moral reflection when we determine whether we are good or bad, or put differently if we are beasts or not. All one must do is abide by the baseline of morality prescribed by law to not be a beast.

Fixating on Small Social Ills to Avoid Great Legal Failures

Yet, it was the law that allowed the senseless gunning down of Trayvon Martin, and more dramatically, it was the law that permitted slavery, promoted anti-miscegenation, failed to punish the thousands responsible for lynching and torturing Black bodies, ensured the Black and white wealth gap through redlining, and diluted the Black vote through gerrymandering.

The law allows us to point to those that use drugs, or steal, or even drink in excess and drive, and we label those people as the beasts of society that must be contained. Doing so allows many to easily evade the label. Why is it so easy to go to jail for drugs, yet so hard to punish hate crimes, or sexual assault, or discrimination based on race, gender, and religion? Why have we failed to punish the deepest evils plaguing our society, and in fact used the law to exacerbate them? It is because we all want to point to the small beast, and hide from the big ones amongst us—too scared to confront them. We allow the real beasts to roam free, unchecked by the law. Because their actions do not meet the definition of illegal, we say they are not beasts at all, and those more minor societal infractions are the villains that would make life nasty, brutish, and short if we allowed them to persist.

The Gavel of Bullies

In reality, the law is the source of power for the powerful. It is the method that they use to exact their will on the weaker members of society. They are the same beasts of lawless times, yet instead of using brute force, their exploitation and dominance is maintained through the written word, and therefore the force is legitimized. But, laws that betray justice, are not legitimate, and laws that perpetuate greater evils than the social harms they were meant to prevent are intolerable. It would seem that the law has been abused to ensure the greatest suffering and unhappiness for millions of Black Americans, betraying its utilitarian and moral purpose

My Black Lawyer’s Guide

So, if I must inherit the power inequalities that accompany being a Black man in America, I may as well understand the tool being used against me. If I cannot beat the oppressor, I may as well learn to evade his traps. If I cannot break down the doors of the jails, I may as well understand how to keep future generations beyond its death grip. So, when asked, why I return to the classroom and take on astronomical debt, the answer is simple: survival. Some people live in a world of choices, because they’ve never had to shout out in chorus, “I can’t breathe,” but others of us live in a world of exigencies.

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