It's awesomely awesome

that I now sleep about four hours a night. Why? Why? I went to bed at 11pm, getting all excited about a long night of uninterrupted sleep. Then I wake up. At 2am. Then again at 3:30. And remain awake. My head is a jackhammer. My heart is a frantic min-pin. My eyes are shuddering in their sockets. I'm attempting to read a couple pages of Contracts but all these words, they make no sense!

Turning now to Section 2-207, "a definite and seasonable expression of acceptance or a written confirmation which is sent within a reasonable time operates as an acceptance even though it states terms additional to or different from those offered or agreed upon, unless acceptance is expressly made conditional on assent to the additional or different terms."

All these words, individually, make plenty sense. But when they are strung together, some baffling beast emerges sui generis and conspires against my head. I mean, I get it, I guess. But not without some effort and lots of discomfort.

Having said that, though, law really appeals to the failed biology student in me. I like how it is an attempt to categorize and order the universe of human justice. I like how ostensibly after one understands a coherent system of law--oxymorons aside, of course--one can look at any event, let's say a windy day sweeping leaves up in Morningside Park around the Little Leaguers and Pop Warner football boys, and then divide that event into juridical categories that can be scrutinized one at a time. The liability of the Parks Department for a tree branch falling on my head; the contracts made between the manufacturers of baseballs and the cattle farmers who raise the cows for the leather on the balls; the criminality of the high school kids who give each other blowjobs at the top of the stairs, etc. I mean, the above quotation regards when a promise is made and then the promisee tries to change the terms of the promise. Following that, there are additional subsections that deal with how the promisee attempts to change the promise--whether the changes are material or whether there exists express language in the promise that forbids such changes--and then after that, there are even more specific tests for determining whether or not a change counts as "material" etc.

There's something so gratifyingly organized about law, at least law in theory and not messily and arbitrarily applied to practice. Unlike the social science I spent most of my undergraduate days studying and then scorning, law at least constructs a putatively rigorous scientific-seeming system for students to attempt to understand. I hated how other social sciences put forth these pseudo-scientific theories--here's a theory of multiple intelligences, or an equation for determining a country's expected growth rate based on the dental hygiene standards of the middle income bracket--that were just hard science flunkies disguising their wack social science ideas with outline form. I mean:

I. I guess if you look organized, then
A. What you say is to be believed
B. What you say looks more rigorous
C. What you say looks like it might be valuable
D. What you say can be funded by undergraduate tuition coffers
II. But really, all you're saying is
A. I had a cousin once
i. My theories are really based on what I learned from my cousin.
ii. My cousin also told me some interesting stories about what
people are like in the South.
B. I also read some anecdotes from David Brooks' articles.
i. I guess I can reliably make predictions about red v. blue
states based on what I have read about people who live
in those states based on David Brooks.
ii. Has David Brooks ever ventured into a "red" state?
a. It is unclear.

But no worries, critical readers. I have long since disabused myself of naive notions of "objectivity" and "rigor." As I have suggested in other blogposts, I've been appalled at not how judges obviously map their own identities onto their interpretations of the law, but rather how law attempts to claim that this subjective interpretation doesn't happen. Hello, "objective standard"? Hello, "reasonable man"? Obviously law as a scientific system is fundamentally flawed. But, I can still prize it for being more flow-chartable than, say, the anthropology of food and culture.

What I also like about how law bills itself as a comprehensive system for understanding justice is that there are such obvious and irreconciable conflicts when you put up two competing systems of law side by side. If one theory of criminality bases culpability on offending community standards, and another theory bases it on offending the Koran, and both theories are neat, perfect packages, your head explodes! It's just not possible! It's just like the fable of my people about man who claims to sell an impenetrable shield as well as an indominable spear:

In the State of Chu, there was a man who shouted loudly to praise his spear and
shield which he was offering for sale. "My shield is so strong that nothing can
go through it. And my spear is so strong that it can go through anything" he
sang loudly. A man walked by and asked: "What would happen if you use your spear
to pierce your shield?" He could not answer the question.

Okay, my analogies are stretching thin and now it's 7:15 and I should get to bed. More about law as science some other sleepless night.