Volume V

VOLUME V

Legal Institutions

This is the fifth volume of The Justice Way. Its subject is the law.

Before going further, it is worth saying plainly what this volume is and is not. It is not a law textbook. It will not teach you how to win a case, sign a contract, or memorize a statute. It is not a book of grievance either. It takes no side, sets out to condemn no one, pleads no one's cause. It is a book about position. From the first page to the last it does one thing. It sets the real position of the law in front of you, layer by layer, and leaves you to see it for yourself and judge for yourself.

Why write it this way. Because of all the institutions a society runs on, the law is the one dressed most beautifully, and the one hardest to see clearly. Open any book of law and the same words are waiting. Justice, order, rights, equality. Not one of them is wrong. But they lie over the thing like sheet after sheet of fine paper, wrapping what the law actually is somewhere deep inside. This volume peels the paper off, one sheet at a time, until the thing underneath can be seen for what it is.

At the very bottom sits a sentence plain enough to be uncomfortable. The law is not a justice that fell from the sky. It is a tool that grew up out of the ground. It is made by human hands, and it carries the position and the limits of the hands that made it. This is not meant to leave you distrusting the law, or finished with it. Just the opposite. Once you see what it is, you can use it, keep it, and change it with your eyes open.

Six parts, fourteen chapters, forty-two sections of main text, stacked into forty-three layers. And the forty-three layers are not scattered. They are a single line drawn straight through, top to bottom.

Part One, the roots of law. It sets the highest position first. The law is not the highest thing. Above it stands something the ancestors called the Way of Heaven. This book gives it a name a modern reader can hold, natural law. A human law that agrees with it stands and lasts. A human law that runs against it, however strict, however airtight, comes down in the end. Then the second layer. The law is Wei, what Xunzi called the made, that which is fashioned by human hands and not handed down by Heaven. The law is the largest made thing of all. Then the layer that matters most. Whom the law serves is not decided by its words. It is decided by the position of the people who write it, enforce it, and interpret it. This part lays the whole foundation. However high the five parts after it climb, they all come to rest on it.

Part Two, how the law runs. It answers the knot left by Part One, why the law in practice so often runs differently from the way it reads on the page. Because the real direction of the law is set by the structure of power, and power expands itself by nature, so the law drifts, steadily, toward the strong. Following that thread, the part walks through public legal education, lawyers, lawmakers, vested interests, and the self-rescue of the weak, and the walking is heavy. But it does not stop in the heavy place. At the end it raises the highest position the law can reach, self-discipline, the highest law a person gives to himself, and above that the state in which everyone governs himself and disputes never reach the court, the highest condition the law can arrive at.

Part Three, how the law treats an ordinary person. The lens pulls in close, and stays beside one living person. It looks at which way the burden of proof points, at how guilt is really a matter of position, at how the law is dead and a person is alive. It looks at who "we the people" has ever actually included. And it ends on a clear stance, defending neither power nor crime, holding a single measure, the one that asks what you would not want done to yourself, to both ends alike.

Part Four, law and scarcity. This part digs to the root question, why the law exists at all. The answer, when output falls short there is scarcity, scarcity brings struggle, struggle brings law, and the one who writes the law is the stronger party. From land, the longest line, three thousand years long, to the imperial examinations, to marriage, to learning itself, and on to eight tools at work in America and China today, one logic runs through all of it, ancient and modern, East and West. At the end the lens pulls back, from inside one nation to the space between nations.

Part Five, position between nations. Between nations there is no highest lawmaker and no highest enforcer, only the balance of force. This part sorts international behavior into five depths, from the shallow to the deep, and the deepest it calls occupying a position. It looks at what kind of nation goes to take and what kind gets taken, and at the taken nation's three answers, to accept, to resist, to grow strong. The one who takes is not an evil man, and the one who is taken from is not a good man. It all turns on which position each one stands in at that moment.

Part Six, the age of artificial intelligence. This is the volume's heaviest step down onto the ground, pushing every position that came before it into a moment each of us is standing inside right now. Artificial intelligence is one more industrial stampede, and the law always lags, and once it catches up it is written, more often than not, for those who already hold. The intelligence is a tool, but most of the people training it hold no license, and when something goes wrong the responsible party is lost in a sea of faces and cannot be reached, while the people it replaces are left standing on an ever narrower position. All forty-three layers come to their cap here, and stop in front of a paradox that is laid out and not resolved.

Three things are worth holding in mind before reading.

First, this volume lays out positions and gives no way out. Every bind is set in front of you, and no ready answer comes with it. The answer is in the next volume, Saving People. The more clearly this volume sets the positions, the more firmly that way out will stand.

Second, this volume takes no side. It speaks of China without boasting and of the West without smearing, crowns no strong party as evil and lifts up no weak party as good. It trusts one thing. Setting both positions down honestly is worth more than handing you any verdict. The judgment is yours.

Third, almost nothing said here is new. Laozi, Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, Han Fei, Zhuangzi, Guan Zhong, Shang Yang, Huang Zongxi, Sima Qian, Wang Yangming set these positions out more than two thousand years ago. This book only takes what the ancestors said, puts it in the plain speech of today, connects it to the world of today, and says it once more.

Now, with eyes willing to see a position clearly and in no hurry to judge it, step into Part One, the roots of law.

Contents

Part One. The Roots of Law.

Part Two. How Law Runs, and the Highest Point Is Self-Discipline.

Part Three. How Law Treats an Ordinary Person.

Part Four. Law and Scarcity, from One Nation to Many.

Part Five. Position Between Nations.

Part Six. The Age of Artificial Intelligence, and the Law That Lags.

Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.