The wearing of wigs says it all. Law may be the one thing saving us from chaos, but it sustains itself through a false, pompous and outmoded sham.
The problems about laws is the people who make them, enforce them and the fact the laws tend to stick around long after their shelf-life is over. Whoever invented democracy, legal institutions and legal training are now long gone. Both had a shared vision which amounted to little more than a crass blind faith. Because some retired school teacher from a suburb of Hamburg or fishmonger from Dubrovnik decides to enter politics and gets people to vote for them (usually for want of anyone else) does not automatically qualify them to decide on new laws or, worse still, propose them. Neither does a complex court structure give rise to justice or legal training alone make a wise, insightful or moral person.
Then, we might ask, is one action in Bangkok legal whilst it is a criminal act in Singapore? Moreover, why is it that decisions by French conseil de prud’hommes seem to always favour employees, whilst German labour courts offer a balance of judgments between the parties? Where is a sense of universal “rights” or even handed justice?
The pace of change in the last twenty years has been so great that reality has moved on way beyond legal strictures that seemed right in 1989. Never was this more true in the field of data protection laws largely drawn up before the age of the Internet and working time laws that preceded the use of laptops, tablets and smart phones. Don’t we all send data around the globe now and work 24/7? Why do we have to deal with the nonsense of strictures drawn up by amateurs, administered by a judiciary long past normal retirement age and manipulated by mischievous lawyers out to bully for a fat fee well intentioned employers trying to make sense of outmoded constraints??