Being what it's being

[Please see my original post here.]

Studying law using the case method can be fairly discouraging and saddening.

The guy who was found in his car with a stack of pictures of children in sexually explicit poses? He got off on a technicality.

The woman who watched her dying daughter being pulled from the wreckage of a really bad car accident? She recovered no money. Then there's adverse possession, in which individuals who intentionally inhabit others' property get to keep it after the statute of limitations runs out. Good doctrine; bad people. Morgan v. Kroupa: a kid lost his dog. Five years later he found the dog living with a new owner and the dog jumped into the boy's truck as he drove away. The finder got to keep the dog.

Then there are the encouraging outcomes resulting from outrageous behavior. The couple who kept a sick old man on their weather-exposed porch until he died of starvation while they stole all of his money: convicted. The black kid who directed his friends to attack a white kid based on his race: convicted and sentence enhanced because the event was a hate crime. The woman who, along with her boyfriend, consistently beat her five year old daughter until she died: convicted.

Law school lessons include the understanding that there are bad people all over the place. Sometimes they get off and sometimes they get punished but they're still bad and they're still out there. And they're probably out there doing bad things while I'm learning the objective theory of contracts.

But still. We have laws and they mostly try to care for us when really awful things happen, or moderately awful things, or just things that are beyond annoying but not necessarily in the realm of awful.

When I was in my early twenties a guy broke into my apartment and spent two hours frightening me before taking some cash and leaving. Even though the police did next to nothing to catch the guy, I'm encouraged to know that we have a law and it says that burglary is a felony: breaking/ and entering/ the dwelling/ of another/ at night/ with the intent/ to commit a felony/ therein. We have laws to smack this guy down.

Then there was the milder event in which a pet sitter, T., let my sister's indoor cat escape in the middle of winter. The cat spent two days cowering beside the house and was attacked by a wild animal. The vet bill was something like $2,000. My sister took T. to court but lost the case. Now I know that T. was indeed guilty of at least breach of contract and possibly negligence. She fractured the duty of ordinary care required of a bailee and if my sister had argued the case before a different judge and had brought just a little more knowledge of the law she would've owned that pet sitter's arse.

The study of law is the study of people, and the study of what people do wrong and what people do right. It's also obviously a study of the law, and what it does wrong and what it does right.

The burglar still got off and the pet sitter is probably still out there caring for people's pets. I have no moral here; I have no conclusion. It just is what it is.