With Law we name a cultural god, a god to whom lawyers, judges, and other penitents can worship; we take up law and become adherents and penitents the way we enter the realm of any myth, any world of gods.
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With Law we name a cultural god, a god to whom lawyers, judges, and other penitents can worship; we take up law and become adherents and penitents the way we enter the realm of any myth, any world of gods. |
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W.B. Yeats, the poet, is reputed to have said: "I have often had the fancy that there is some one Myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought." The same might be said for those who take up Law as discipline, profession, and way of life. Law is not only an archetypal force in culture but in the lives of its individual followers, the lives of those who take up its practices as a profession, who use Law directed ways of thinking and speech, and who assume the character of the Lawyer. Myth pulls us into the archaic past and the possible future, even as we hold tenaciously to the present, to the conventions held out to us, to the serviceable clichés that keep us on good terms with our employers and companions. It would be difficult to find a culture—and the culture of law is no exception—that does not make of its origin and destiny a mythic story. |
law as a god of culture