Do You Think You're Clever? by John Farndon Read Free Book Online

protect their interests, not to find the honest course. Viewed in this cynical way, a lawyer’s task is to negotiate a path through the thickets of legal restrictions, not to uphold the truth, or even ensure justice. A lawyer might, for instance, be employed to locate a loophole in the law that allows a client to get away with what, to an honest man, looks a lot like robbery.
    Indeed, one way of looking at the law would be as a programme for society, providing automatic checks, controls and guidelines to keep society running smoothly and ensure good behaviour – or rather, behaviour that causes no conflict. Like a computer program, the law viewed this way is blind, and honesty becomes irrelevant. All that matters is compliance with the law, and lawyers are simply skilled operators of the program.
    But this sci-fi Orwellian view of law, in which individuals are reduced to bit parts, is actually very different from the messy reality in which honesty does and must have arole. It’s no accident that the very first thing a witness is asked when he or she steps into the witness box at a trial is the oath to tell ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’. This need for honesty is right at the heart of the law.
    Of course, nearly all of us are dishonest in some way from time to time. For most, it’s no more than telling an occasional white lie. Only for a few is it a major crime. And this is the crux. A system of law is workable only because most people are essentially honest most of the time. If most were essentially
dis
honest, society could probably be kept stable only by military means, and the rule of law would be unworkable. However, if people were entirely honest all the time, laws would be largely unnecessary. All we would probably need were codes with guidelines to help people settle disputes, rather than enforceable laws. The force of law is needed to cope with the, fortunately rare, times when people are dishonest. In theory, it protects the majority of honest people from the minority of dishonest people. Enforceable laws are, of course, a restriction on our freedom but as the philosopher John Locke made clear, we enter a social contract, agreeing to these restrictions on our freedom in return for the protection from others’ dishonesty that laws provide.
    The legal system would rapidly grind to a halt if we couldn’t trust that people are essentially honest most of the time – and the provision ‘most of the time’ is essential. We don’t simply rely on witnesses to tell the truth in court. Werely on officers of the law to be honest, for instance – to tell the truth and not be swayed by undue influence and bribery. If they weren’t, the country would no longer be governed by laws but by power networks. And most legal documents carry the rider in ‘good faith’ – because it’s simply impractical to cover every eventuality. Similarly, if crime were too rife, the courts would become clogged and the legal system would break down.
    The classic assumption underpinning the criminal justice system, ‘innocent until proven guilty’ assumes of course that most people are indeed honest. The burden is therefore on the legal system to prove that someone is dishonest, or worse. Imagine how uncomfortable it would be, and how difficult life could become, if officers of the law assumed that all of us were dishonest. That was the problem with the ‘sus’ laws in the UK that became so unpopular in the early 1980s because of the way they seemed to target racial groups that they were eventually abolished. Recent anti-terrorist legislation provokes the same problems.
    But there is a problem with trust that is emerging in the legal systems of the UK and USA in particular. Although a belief in the fundamental honesty of most people is vital to the legal system, a strand of social, political and economic thinking emerged in recent decades that was in some ways opposed to this notion. Ideas such as game theory