Recently on CBC Radio’s “Sunday Edition,” I heard this excerpt from an interview with Wendell Berry, the farmer-intellectual from Kentucky:

You know that everybody subscribed, finally, to what I call the industrial economic program, which said that it was better to buy things than it was to produce things, essentially. That’s the doctrine. You are better off, and also a better kind of person, if you buy your food than you are if you grow it. You make a situation that’s enormously profitable to industries. So you have an industry that grows the food, an industry that transports the food, an industry that packages the food, an industry that advertises and sells the food, and so on. And so all these industries, in a sense, burgeon upon a kind of helplessness that modern people have to do anything for themselves, to satisfy themselves, to please themselves. So you can tell the extent of our unhealthiness and unhappiness by the number of industries that now depend on our unhealthiness and unhappiness.

I’d reckon you can guess where I’m going to go with this; but let me get there in a roundabout way.

I once pseudonymously wrote a much-too-lengthy essay (124KB PDF) about why graffiti doesn’t get enough respect. I wrote it because people I’d never met were publicly calling me a pothead and an idiot after I defended graffitists in a letter to the editor of what was then my local newspaper. The content of that old essay isn’t terribly important here—except for the first full paragraph on page two and footnotes 14 and 15 later on. If you look at those, you’ll see that they are references to city code sections and a U.S. Supreme Court opinion, respectively. And they are the product of what I think was my first ever visit to a law library.

That summer 2002 law library trip—to see if I could find out whether, how, and why graffiti was illegal—was what got me thinking about law school, which I ended up enrolling in about a year later. A lot of the reason why I ended up enrolling was because of the helplessness of going in that law library and trying to figure out any single thing about the law I was expected to live under. There I was, excessively educated, embarassingly familiar with libraries, and eager to find out some simple things about my city’s ordinances, yet I’m sure it took me a good three hours or more before I had any clue about what was going on. For one thing, I was sort of puzzled over how hard it was to even track down the city code. What I finally did find were two dusty binders that were clearly an afterthought in the collections manager’s plan. The whole remainder of that massive library was about something else. Something else that was all very mysterious to me.

Within about four months of starting law school, the mystery had mostly burnt away. A friend in law school, upon learning of my Fulbright project, told me how he remembered thinking at the end of his first semster, “if people only knew what we know…” But the law is, it turns out, just a professional specialization. And as with pretty much every other professional specialization, like say forest management, there is a certain way of thinking and talking about it that you have to slip into before it makes sense. The problem, though, is that unlike, say, forest management, the law is something that everybody has to very directly deal with every day whether they like it or not.

The result, I think, is helplessness. And in democratic society, it is the same helplessness that Wendell Berry is talking about when he talks about the “industrial economic program” of the food business. You have an industry that conceives of the people’s laws, writes the people’s laws, enforces the people’s laws, maintains the people’s laws, and so on. I am not talking about the upper-class monopoly over elected positions, politics, and policy—that’s a separate (although maybe related) problem. I am concerned with something more basic: the ability of even educated people to find out about and make sense of the laws and legal systems that operate to either restrain or encourage their daily activities.

Is the legal system a small circle of people on the playground making up new rules for the basketball game going on nearby, then waiting with grins for someone to do something wrong without even knowing it? Or, as it’s been put another way: “In a Grade I class to the question ‘Who makes the law?’ the spontaneous answer was: ‘the police.’ Now we all know that this is wrong. But is it? In a Grade 12 class on the other hand, which has a course in law, the answers were so much more ‘knowledgeable’—but were they right?”