Lawyer bloggers and unemotional criminals

I have to say that some lawyer-bloggers have improved my opinion of lawyers. I know and like lawyers, of course, but they cease to be lawyerly when in social situations. When they show up at my house for dinner, they may as well be plumbers for all the difference it makes. And I almost never deal with the legal system. I've had one moving-violation ticket and only a few (maybe five) parking tickets in my entire life and that is it*.

Reading about lawyers, it is easy to form a very low opinion of them. Reading lawyers writing blogs—Glen Reynolds or Ann Althouse—OTOH, is often quite inspiring. Over and over again I'm struck at how much more intelligent and judicious they are than even top level journalists.

All of which is a lead into this quote from Ann Althouse:

"She was upset, but not overly emotional, approaching her appeal 'like a game of chess'..."

You know the kind of chess game where you suddenly sweep all the pieces off the board and onto the floor.

The quoted bit is from a news article. Althouse is right, there is a bizarre discontinuity between the quote and its subject. There is an implied judgment in the comment, which comes from her husband, as if to say, there was no reason to suspect that she'd do something like this. As we read on, we see the husband trying to convince us that there was some sort of "trigger" for Amy Bishop's actions; as if it wasn't really her fault.

Picking up on a theme I have hit in before, perhaps the calm rationality of Bishop is the problem. We are so bombarded with the notion that "rational" means something good and admirable that we fail to see that there is something wrong with someone who acts rationally and calmly in a situation that doesn't call for this response.

Irrationality, OTOH, is not the negative it is often taken as when we are discussing moral issues abstractly (Wittgenstein would say, when our moral engines are idling). In real life we not only tolerate irrationality, we expect it. Imagine talking to a mother who didn't have an irrational attachment to her own child. If you knew a woman who always judged her child as coolly and dispassionately as all other children, you'd get quite a creep feeling about her.






* When I was a teenager, there were a couple of times the police showed up because of alcohol or dug use, noise or public sex had or was about to take place. In each and every one of these cases, the police simply told us to pack up and move along and don't do it again. I suppose those were technically encounters with legal system but ...