The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.
Interpretation
The law is flawed and often does not lead to true justice, but can produce just outcomes under certain conditions.
In this quote, Raymond Chandler highlights the inherent imperfections of legal systems, suggesting that they are merely mechanistic tools designed to function under specific conditions. While it’s possible for justice to emerge from the law, it often requires a combination of luck and precise circumstances, emphasizing that the pursuit of justice is complicated by the limitations of legal frameworks.
In practice
During a debate about criminal justice reform, this quote can highlight the flaws in the legal system.
Undoubtedly the stories about them [hard-boiled detectives] had a fantastic element. Such things happened, but not so rapidly, nor to so close-knit a group of people, nor within so narrow a frame of logic. This was inevitable because the demand was for constant action; if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.
Organized crime is the dirty side of the sharp dollar.
When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.
If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.
True time is four-dimensional.
The cosmos doesn’t measure sweat and hours for reward. The cosmos deals in the currencies of joy and satisfaction.
To think that before the hills were formed, or the channels of the sea were scooped out, God loved me; that from everlasting to everlasting His mercy is upon His people. Is not that a consolation?
American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.
No method of procedure has ever been devised by which liberty could be divorced from local self-government. No plan of centralization has ever been adopted which did not result in bureaucracy, tyranny, inflexibility, reaction, and decline.
You never go away from us, yet we have difficulty in returning to You. Come, Lord, stir us up and call us back. Kindle and seize us. Be our fire and our sweetness. Let us love. Let us run.
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