February 24, 2006
HIGH PRIESTS OF THE CIVIC RELIGION?:
Can a People Have Too Much Respect for the Law? (Lee Harris, 06/27/2005, Tech Central Station)
Can a people have too much respect for the law?This might appear to be a strange question to ask. Americans, after all, seem to believe that it is impossible to have too much respect for the law. Yet a visitor to our shores in 1867 -- and an English barrister at that -- disagreed with this proposition.
The visitor was William Hepworth Dixon, whose book, New America, is a delight to read. By and large, he found us as a people quite likable, unlike some of the earlier travelers from England, such as Charles Dickens and Francis Trollope, both of whom agreed that we were simply deplorable barbarians. Not so Dixon. Yet there was one aspect of our national character that disagreed with him. Our "deference to the Law, and to every one who wears the semblance of lawful authority, is so complete…as to occasion a traveler some annoyance and more surprise," Dixon wrote. "Every dog in office is obeyed with such unquestioning meekness, that every dog in office is tempted to become a cur."
Dixon singled out the Justices of the Supreme Court, noting with apparent dismay that they are "treated with a degree of respect akin to that which is paid to an archbishop in Madrid and to a cardinal in Rome."
Similarly, every president undergoes a revival of reputation once he leaves office and even our most disgraceful actions as a nation end up being seen as justified. It seems a function of democracy. After all, we're not going to blame ourselves for stuff, are we? Posted by Orrin Judd at February 24, 2006 11:09 PM
One day about 20 or so years ago, I was waiting with a roomful of attorneys, witnesses and defendants for a judge to come back from the noon recess.
He came in, about 20 minutes late, in no condition to proceed--quite drunk, in fact. He was hollering boisterously and throwing papers about the room.
We lawyers took this with quiet amusement, but the reaction of the other citizens was striking. They were uniformly shocked and appalled. Even the prisoners in handcuffs waiting for parole violation hearings and sentencings shared this response. The least of them and the worst of them had a respect for the law that this man had affronted.
American do have the kind of respect for the law identified in the article. You can see it in the way jurors discharge their responsiblity. Even the cynical are cynical because they feel they have the right to expect better.
Most of the rest of the world has nothing like this. It is quite likely that respect for the law is one of the wellsprings of our success. We should think about this whenever someone proposes some radical change in our legal system.
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