<< I'm not sure why Justin is holding out for all this Posnerian defense of the
law. Most of law is the oppressive use of overwhelming corporate power in the
courts to redistribute wealth from the working class to the corporate rich.
>>
Nathan concedes my point while appearing to dispute it. Many people hate lawyers because a lot of law is bad and oppressive and friendly to the rich, that: in other words because we have bad laws. As I said. I largely agree with his appraisal of federal labor law since Taft-Hartley, which Nathan's beloved Democrats never got around to repealing when they had both houses of Congress and even the Presidency, and the crumby caselaw around which was made in no small part by the Warren Court. Labor law is bad enough that the union movement would be better off if all of it were repealed except for the anti-injunction act.
However, even there, there is a lot more to law than labor law, which is pretty much a backwater anyway. (In a year and a half of clerking I have never had a labor law case, although I have lots of employment cases, mostly discrimination cases.) A lot of that other law is bad, but at least some of that bad law, mainly the criminal law, is very popular with the workers, as has been noted in the context of the death penalty.
But even if many of our laws are bad not to say that law is bad, that is, the practice of having enforceable rules that require interpretation, or indeed that dealing with such rules is wasteful and nonproductive. I mean, you want wasteful and nonproductive, if people hated that, they'd hate capitalists, who, unlike lawyers, no longer serve any socially useful functions.
I may insist on this Posnerian point because of my background, although I got the idea mainly by thinking about Hegel. "Posnersian," btw, is supposed to be a jab: the Chief Judge of the court where I worked last year, the Seventh Circuit is a quirky briliant right wing scholar named Richard Posner who likes to offer economic analyses of everything and justify libertarian policies and interpretations in term of efficiency. However, for a hopeless right-winger like myself who admires Hayek, being called a Posnerian is not going to hurt. I [probably am a Posnesian in many ways. I certainly am a pragmatist like Posner. A lot of leftists could do worse as a model for prose than to emulate his lively and accessible style
Posner, commenting on a paper of mine, told me that I was stuck in a jejeune egalitarianism and that I was naive to think that the poor could ever be an effective political force, however, so you can take that as a sort of recommendation.