Legally Dumb
link Long Island Middle School Bans Footballs, Other Recreational Items « CBS New York.
The knee jerk response is to tsk tsk the parents of these precious darlings for treating their spawn like Faberge eggs, but that would be a mistake. While most parents have some sense of over protectiveness with regard to their children, few expect that they would be completely insulated from playground activities. Anyone who has not suffered an abrasion, bruise or scraped knee as a kid must have never attended school; maybe they were living in an aquarium. But it’s not Bloomberg-ism that is driving this policy. It’s lawyers. No doubt, the administrators at this school were petrified at the possibility that under their care, some harm would come to junior which would open them up for an expensive lawsuit. It’s amazing that they don’t mandate the wearing of helmets during class.
It used to be that you could never exceed the reach of the long arm of the law, but over generations, this has morphed into not escaping the long tentacles of lawyers. As we’ve discussed previously, when a nation puts out as many law grads as the U.S. does, they have to make themselves useful somehow. Statistically, few of these lawyers will be Oliver Wendell Holmes material. Most of what they do in real life will circulate around arguing petty rules and grievances rather than arguing big picture principles. Unluckily for the public, many of them wind up as politicians.
Life truly does imitate art as even the depiction of lawyers has evolved over the years. In the old days, Perry Mason was the admired role model; today, it’s more Jackie Chiles from the Seinfeld show. In fact, the very expression “frivolous lawsuits” is as redundant as “bleeding heart liberal”. While there exists many arbiters of what’s legal, there does not exist any arbiters of what’s stupid.
And that’s unlikely to change anytime soon. As a society, we have been programmed to be passive about most things and instructed to ‘let the process work’ as far as legal fixes, no matter how convoluted or illogical that process may be. Ironically, what has evolved is a society openly contemptuous of many of its laws and especially of their lawmakers, rather than a more civilized one. As criminals know, laws are for law abiders.
It’s highly unlikely that those first crafting laws for our society envisioned exhaustive prescriptive rules rather than on general humanistic principles. That occurs only in Muslim enclaves and in North Korea under Mullah X or Kim Jong Un. To be lumped in with societies run by those folks should be sobering for anyone.