VOLUME V, CHAPTER 2
Three Old Sayings of Ordinary People, Where the Base of Law Sits
The chapter before this set what the law is, what Wei is, and whom the law serves, and built the foundation from the first layer to the fourth. This chapter keeps digging downward, and it does something the field of law tends to consider beneath it. It reaches for three sayings that ordinary people keep on their lips every day and that serious legal thought waves off as folk talk. The law is never far from human feeling. The law cannot govern the many. No one is without fault. Each of the three sounds like something stitched on a pillow, and each one holds a layer of principle the ancestors set down long ago and set down deep. The work of this chapter is to carry them back out of the prejudice, one at a time, and return them to their real position.
The first section takes up the law is never far from human feeling. Human feeling here is not pulling strings through a back door and it is not favoritism. It is ordinary human nature, the river the law has to cross to reach a living person. A law that pretends the river is not there does not come out purer, it comes out cruel. This is the fifth layer.
The second section takes up the law cannot govern the many. Enforcement has a ceiling. Push a law past that ceiling, past the point where most people simply will not or cannot obey, and what has failed is not the law and not the crowd. It is the one who set the line, the lawmaker. This is the sixth layer.
The third section takes up no one is without fault, and with it digs out the deepest base under everything in this chapter. The people who write the law, enforce it, judge under it, and keep it are all people, and people are not perfect, so the law is never perfect either. This is the seventh layer, and it draws the first seven layers together into one whole web.
These three sections build from the fifth layer to the seventh, and set the base of the law at its deepest. Walk out of this chapter and you understand something plain, that the sayings ordinary people are looked down on for repeating often sit closer to the truth of the law than the tall words in the textbook. The stance has not shifted. Both true things are shown from both sides. It lays out the positions and draws no conclusion, and leaves the judgment to you.
Contents
Section One. The Law Is Never Far from Human Feeling.
Section Two. The Law Cannot Govern the Many.
Section Three. No One Is Without Fault, and So the Law Is Never Perfect.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.