Law's grave study.(THE STRAGGLER)(legal system in England)(Column)

I do not know the forms of law; I do know law and reason, though I am no lawyer professed: but I know as much law as any gentleman in England.--King Charles I, at his trial

MR. AND MRS. STRAGGLER went down to the local attorney's office last week to get our wills wrapped up, a thing we have been putting off for far too long. This was just as the Harriet Miers storm was breaking, so that I have been obliged to give some thought to the law at both ends, from the most commonplace personal services to the mighty nation-shaking lucubrations of the Supremes.

In re (see how I get into the spirit of the thing?) matters of law, I am of King Charles's party: "no lawyer professed," but still blithe in the confidence that I have sufficient understanding of jurisprudential principles to say intelligent things on the subject--at the very least, to distinguish between obviously good judgments and obviously bad ones. This is probably a delusion, but it is one so widespread that there is very little motivation to rid oneself of it. It is also a delusion much more easily fallen into in these United States, where the fundamental principles of law are helpfully written out in a Constitution brief and clear enough to be read through in a couple of hours. The law in England is more opaque and anonymous, the Constitution unwritten. Not one Englishman in twenty could name the current Lord Chancellor. Throw the Lord Chief Justice and the Master of the Rolls into the quiz, and you are down to one in a thousand.

When I first became aware of the existence of the law as an institution, it seemed to me that nothing could be more solid, more forbidding, more awe-inspiring. At the top were grave elderly gentlemen in breeches, robes, and horsehair wigs. They presided over courts stiff with ceremony, wherein other gents wearing lesser robes and smaller wigs addressed them as "My Lord," and each other as "My learned friend." Latin tags were flung around with wild abandon. (Whence the proverbial exchange, from the days of British rule in Ireland: "Mr. O'Connell, has your client never heard the expression sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas?"--"M'Lud, in the remote fishing village in County Kerry where my client lives, they speak of little else.") When not conversing in Latin, lawyers tended to lapse into Norman French: mortmain, champerty, embracery, seisin. The whole business was as conservative as an institution can be, redolent of ancient rules and forms. It breathed tradition and precedent. Most awe-inspiring of all were the little black cap a judge donned when pronouncing sentence of death, and the form of words that followed: "The sentence of the court upon you is, that you be taken from this place to a lawful prison and thence to a place of execution and that you be hanged by the neck until you are dead ..."

Even the lower circles of the legal world, down below the judges and barristers, were sufficiently forbidding. A trip to see one's solicitor (the person who, in England, mediates between layman and advocate, and performs small legal chores) required a smart turnout and a deferential manner. I vividly remember my own first such call. It was in the company of my father, I forget on what business, in ...