Lex Est
An Introduction
It comes as no surprise that this is a legal blog. It purports to no novelty, as others have, but simply to pleasure: my own and yours. I hope that this can provide for its readers the jewels and baubles of the legal history, jurisprudence, and legal commentary that I remain ever enamored of and moved by. Entries will themselves, I expect, be of a coffee-break length, but nevertheless endeavor to an academic character. Law journals, books, and treatises are informative enough, and rightfully lack a focus on anecdotes – like, perhaps, the murder of George Wythe – that often characterize my fancy with history. Pieces written for journals generally have a grander argumentative design, whereas this space is a place for reporting the interesting and beautiful bite-sized gems of law. Plato described lawyers in his Laws — the epieikestatois or learned judges of law — as practicing expertise in art. That is the lost content of law this blog reaches toward. One need not glance at more than a single page of renaissance humanism or Cicero’s De Officiis to hear them echo Plato too.
The purpose of this blog extends beyond chronicling anecdotes, wholesome as they may be. Over the past years, I have been in the fortunate position to read into the annals and vicissitudes of English and American law, often without a sufficient outlet for the reflections I formed upon them. And more, I look with a sense of yearning at the books yet untouched on my shelf, and a project such as this provides more purpose to a read of the Pandects or Littleton.
I might close this entry by drawing attention to this sites name: Lex Est. Someone lacking latin education could guess that this means something like "the law is" or "laws are," which would be correct. I hope that this name will speak to the general content and open-ended nature of this site. In addition, it also recalls a piece of legal history that is especially important to the gems and baubles I wish to share.
Steve Shepherd, in his Selected Writings of Sir Edward Coke, describes a custom of celebrating new Serjeants at Law in the early 17th century. Each new lawyer received a ring with the inscription, Lex est tutissima cassis ("Law is the safest helmet"). This was short for a longer maxim: Lex est tutissima cassis, sub clypeo legis nemo declpitur ("under the shield of law no one is decieved").
It speaks volumes in its simplicity, both of Coke's jurisprudence and of greater assumptions that the legal profession held about the nature of law. For Coke's part, it speaks to a noticeable persistence that a reader of his works will undoubtedly notice: the claim that the end of law is certainty. An example from his preface to the ninth book of Reports goes like this:
“That all Men might receive Justice by certain Laws and holy Judgments, that is, to the end that Justice might be the better administered, that Questions and defects in Laws might be by this high Court of Parliament explained, reduced to certainty, and adjudged."
For those perturbed by the "old dull scoundrel" (Jefferson, letter to John Page, 12/25/1762), it would suffice now to say that a nascent theory of Separation of Powers was opined by Coke through this idea of certainty, and that the monopoly over such certainty in the execution of law belonged to the discretion of judges:
"Discretio est discernere per legem, quid sit justum (Discretion is to know through law what is just), that is, to discerne by the right line of law, and not by the crooked cord of private opinion, which the vulgar call Discretion: Si a` jure discedas, vagus eris, & erunt omnia omnibus incerta ( If you depart from the law, you will go astray, and all things will be uncertain to everybody)."
The assumption made by the maxim of Lex Est, and which our legal system draws upon, is an aspiration toward truth. That is what this blog will attempt to do: pursue truth and discretion through love of law. I hope you will join me.
Law is the stitching of our political tapestry, the synapses of our collective nervous system, and the empty canvas for the agents of creation and destruction to dance their pens. What a beautiful and terrible thing.