Don’t even bother to send me these cases or read them yourself. Because the next step is that all those who try to make sense of them go crazy.

What does having 1,000,000 or 10,000,000 illegal immigrants in the United States have to do with Family Law and both with the stock market, the Internet and the growth of mental illness? When good or bad laws or a mix are ignored or applied on a case-by-case basis a point is reached where no amount of reform makes any difference. In fact, reform itself only adds to the confusion. Ex post facto is not only in the Constitution to protect individual rights but is one means of preventing the law from becoming so dense either no one can understand it or everyone understands it differently, usually reflecting their own interest.

The proliferation and laws and court opinions on minutest aspects of life insure that every part of government that touches such law will themselves balloon into unwieldy bureaucracies. Information overload results. As in the classic early film comedies, one person begins a fight by throwing a pie at another. Stop it at that point and the corrective institutions built into society can deal with it. But they don’t respond fast enough and the pie-throwing begins to take on a dynamic of its own. Like a little vertical wind tunnel, it sucks in more and more air from its surroundings until it becomes a full-fledged hurricane. Everyone in the room is now throwing pies at each other. When law enforcement enters to control to stop the commotion, instead they, too get hit and join in the melee. Now, you not only have individuals breaking the law, you have the law officers breaking the law.

When legislators hear what’s going on, they can’t make head or tail of its causes and whether there is something inherently defective in the legislation. Can a line be drawn under the law they enacted and courts interpret between who started it, who is just protecting themselves and even who are just bystanders. They go to the scene. Once they enter, they get hit by pies also. Instinct results in them throwing pies also.

Now the whole society stops creative work, becomes stressed out and the only beneficiaries are those like the feminists who want to professionalize certain favored interests to give their "religion" one up and medicalize the whole legal process and try to impose unconscionable fees as well as subjective testimony, which gives rise to another pie throwing contest in an adjacent room.

WHAT’S THE ANSWER? THE GOVERNMENT ISSUES AN ORDER TO ALL PIE MAKING COMPANIES TO STOP MAKING PIES OR THE LEGISLATIVE OR JUDICIAL INVESTIGATION BECOMES UNBELIEVABLY TIME CONSUMING. Now the pie-makers, all their suppliers and customers can’t do business and their stocks fold. Stockholders of these companies are wiped out and the rumble spreads to stocks not even remotely related. In addition, you now have a full-fledged collapse of the financial markets which invites foreign and domestic foes of our security to take advantage of the chaos.

Don’t even bother to send me these cases or read them yourself. Because the next step is that all those who try to make sense of them go crazy.

Andrew E. Carlan
Farmingdale, New York

Mr. Carlan is practicing lawyer with a website on New York divorce and custody commentaries as well as essays of more general interest. He is also a regular columnist for several other websites. His articles have appeared in Newsday, the New York Times and he writes regularly for the Nassau Lawyer

You can e-mail your comments to Andrew at acarlan@optonline.net.

Copyright © 2001 Andrew E. Carlan
All Rights Reserved.

-Published with permission