Dear Cyndy,

As I read yesterday's (as yet unanswered) missive to you,
it occurs to me once more that, maligning the law as an
harlot, I am an incorrigible child of the Reformation.
"The law is an harlot!"  Isn't that exactly what Pope
Martin preached? Surely at least some of his encyclicals
must have gotten through to you in all those years in
Wittenberg. So by and by you will get a true idea of who
I am, currently spending virtually the entirety of my
waking days paying Court to a harlot. A lecher. No wonder
you won't talk to me on the 'phone. With the help of
Wikipedia and other Internet resources, I'm trying to
figure out whether to refer to the law as "a harlot" or
"an harlot". Does it matter? Does anyone care?

Some months, - or was it years ago, it occurred to me that
of all the savants who dedicate themselves to the study of
ethics, none that I am acquainted with has propounded my thesis
that the law, the legal system, is the epitome of ethics.
Kant with his phantom Categorical Imperative, and in his wake
the folks that peddle subjectivity and inwardness, Kierkegaard
and his disciples, would try to persuade us that ethics is an
accounting of individual propensity: but the very name "ethics"
referring as it does to society, gives the assertion of
individualistic ethics or ethical individuality, the lie.
Ethics is, and always was, a societal phenomenon, whose nature
is flagrantly exhibited in legal systems of all kinds,
which are understandably embarrassing to the Platonist
who is led on by the scent of the ideal.  Accordingly,
it is the law that hands us the key to the House of Ethics,
but it behooves one to use only one hand when turning the lock,
while holding ones nose with the other.

More recently, it occurred to me, that not only is the law
the abditory of ethics, it also has much to teach about epistemology.
Just as the ethicist would spurn the law for its inanities and
contradictions, so the epistemologist looks down on the law as
mere rhetoric, devoid of a responsible relationship to reality.
The truth which is averred in the courtroom with a raised right
hand has no meaning when studied with the electron microscope
in the laboratory. The apparent incongruity, however, obscures
the analogy, if not the identity of the respective rational
processes. There is a very valid perspective, and perhaps an
ultimate one, in which the assertions of "science" are no less
rhetorical, no less subject to modification, amendment and
retraction than the lawyers' pleadings before the judge in the
courtroom. Both law and science masquerade under the veil of
language, be it verbal or mathematical; language cannot be
separated from the social matrix what spawned it, neither can
science or law. I discern in the societal symbolism exhibited
by both, the only common denominator in terms of which I 
am able to make sense of them.

I understand very well, that the foregoing is (much) more than
you wanted to read. That's how life is: the nutty fruit is
encased in a stony shell. Pity the poor squirrel whose industrious
gnawing is rewarded with a kernel of mush.

Jochen