Ricky Dale Crain states in his letter that “legal realism,” results in having no law at all. I assume he means that if you interpret rather than just follow the law as written, there would be no absolute law that a person (or a court) could follow, and chaos, or worse yet, dreadful harm, would be visited on the populace.
In my experience, I have never met anyone who agreed completely with someone else on the meaning of anything. We all process our interpretations through our own life experiences. And we are all little snowflakes of individuality.
For example, the reason we have so many denominations in Christianity is that people interpret the Bible in different ways. Some people interpret the Bible literally and some interpret it figuratively. Some of the tenets of the Bible are considered to be cultural ways of the past and don’t have to be followed by modern day Christians, such as condoning slavery, the taboo on the eating of shellfish, the practice of polygamy. Even the Old Testament disagrees with the New Testament. “An eye for an eye” vs. “Turn the other cheek.”
The Constitution, and law in general, are the same. We filter our interpretation, our truth, through our own life experiences. You can find our own, modern-day reinterpretation of what the Constitution means by the original method of counting population. Before the emancipation of the slaves, Blacks were counted as 2/3 of a person in order to determine how many representatives could be sent to Congress from a particular area. The Constitution also used to think of actual, full-fledged citizens as being only those who were property-owning white males.
Times change. Past law is overturned to make way for new interpretations.
In my opinion, that’s as it should be, because it can be no other way.
Donna Schoenkopf
Tecumseh
