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"The poet's eye, in a fine 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 Unified Theory of a Law, they are given a local habitation and a name. A Unified Theory of a Law does not present them to you randomly floating independently in a hodgepodge of disorganized ideas. A Unified Theory of a Law organizes them and then presents them to you as parts of a coherent legal system.
The system that is A Unified Theory of a Law is well-defined. 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, fill the hole with A Unified Theory of a Law or any alternative doctrine - if you can find it - that systematically imports, processes and exports legal meaning.
In the first 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 Unified 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
John Bosco
Project Director
The Legal Literacy Project
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This work is licensed by John Bosco under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 3.0), and is an Open Educational Resource.
Last edited by John Bosco on Mar 12, 2011 4:48 pm -0600.
