In my first year of law school, we had a course called Introduction to Civil Law—the shallow end of the legal ocean, where they see which of us could keep our emotions from clouding the patterns of the world we swim in. Our professor, a man whose voice could put caffeine into a coma, droned on without the faintest ripple of drama. And yet, what he lacked in tone, his words carried in weight.
He detonated, without ceremony, the belief system I’d been soaked in since birth. Values. God-given structures. Natural rights. The comforting lie that some things must be a certain way because… well, because they must. And then, just like that, it was gone.Law—even the bedrock kind—is a human invention. Conjured out of thin air, and just as easily dissolved. When the tide turns, it will stand no firmer than a sandcastle before a tsunami.