Connexions module: m20812 1
Closing Statement
∗
John Bosco
This work is produced by The Connexions Project and licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution License
†
"The poet's eye, in a ne frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to
shapes, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name." Shakespeare's A Midsummer
Night's Dream" (5.1.7-12)
The imagination of legal scholars over the centuries has bodied forth, to paraphrase Shakespeare,
the forms of legal things unknown. In
A Unied Theory of a Law
, they are given a local habitation and
a name.
A Unied Theory of a Law
does not present them to you randomly oating independently in a
hodgepodge of disorganized ideas.
A Unied Theory of a Law
organizes them and then presents them to
you as parts of a coherent legal system.
The system that is
A Unied Theory of a Law
is well-dened. Please do not pass blithely over the
word, 'system', as though it is unimportant. It is very important. Ask yourself, "What system do you use
to import, process and export legal meaning?" In all likelihood, you do not have a system. Your law school
left a gaping hole in your legal education that the proverbial truck can be driven through. Instead of taking
umbrage at my exposing the hole in your legal education, ll the hole with
A Unied Theory of a Law
or any
alternative doctrine - if you can nd it - that systematically imports, processes and exports legal meaning.
In the rst half of the nineteenth century, the Danish author, Hans Christian Andersen, wrote a
story called, The Emperor's New Clothes. Anderson told a tale of a king and a kingdom who deceived
themselves into thinking that an imaginary set of clothes were real. When a guileless boy, upon seeing the
king
dressed
in the imaginary set of clothes, exclaimed,
But he hasn't got anything on"
, the bubble of
belief was burst and the illusion shattered.
Andersen's story is an allegory for lawyers.
Too many of the laws that govern us are naked of meaning. Yet, we have convinced ourselves otherwise.
A
Unied Theory of a Law
opens your eyes like the guileless boy in Anderson's story so you won't fool yourself
into thinking that the meaningless is meaningful.
An invasion of armies can be resisted,
but not an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
∗
Version 1.13: Mar 12, 2011 4:48 pm US/Central
†
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
http://cnx.org/content/m20812/1.13/
