. In
>other forms of social organisation, people will not need a lawyer to fix
>their allocation of resources. Lawyers and the law only exist because of
>the failure of capitalist society to spontaneously reproduce the
>conditions of human existence. we will no more need them under a
>different form of social organisation than we would need Shamans or
>Totem poles.
>
Apparently you have never tried to draft a contract or a will, or interpret a statute. Schweickart once asked me if law could possibly give me intellectual satisfaction after philosophy, "After all all you do is look things up." As if even that were easy! Most lawyers don't do a very good job of it, as I can tell you based on bitter and extensive personal experience after having to reconstruct hundreds of briefs where they get everything wrong. We had a casem big complicated case with almosta million dollars at stake, the defendants were represented by a half dozen lawyers from good firms, very experuenced, one at least was excellent, and they failed to locate the key case in their favor where the Illinois Supreme Court construed a horribly drafted statute. I missed it too. The judge found it. Cost me a lot of work to save the jury verdict for the plaintiffs. The opinion was 70 pp. in typescript.
Fact of the matter is, any rules we adopt for, say, planning, will be expressed in language that needs interpretation, both specific and uniform. The language will be complex, often poorly drafted and ambiguous, and lead to undesired results that were not anticipated. Conflicts will arise about who was obligated to provide what for whom. And we will need professionals to sort out whayt the language means, to argue cases before the planning boards and administrative agencies of a communist society.
jks
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