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Judge Fair

5/31/07
Last month I took a spin up to Edmonds, a town a hair north of Seattle that knew us when we were into neoprene and compressed air, with many happy memories and slightly blurry photographs of the underwater park, the oil docks and other choice shore dives. Those times are long past, though they could always come back if I got rich enough to revive my disgracefully undermaintained diving gear. This time I wasn't after available-light shots of plumose anemones or rockfish as big as your leg, I was only there to make a little dough.

I came barreling down the Edmonds Way hill, pacing the traffic at ten miles over the limit, took a smooth right onto 101st, swept down the slope and right into the waiting arms and radar guns of Edmonds' Finest. Smilingly they informed me that I was indeed in violation of the law and could conveniently pay by mail if I didn't want to come back to try to talk the judge down. I thanked them for doing their job, the lousy speedtrappers, and went on my way. Road tax, baby.

But there were complications and alternatives and I didn't really have the money and I was busy and blah blah blah, you know the drill. So last week I found myself sitting in Edmonds Municipal Court with all the rest of the miscreants, waiting my turn to whine. Naturally it was a scene of more than ordinary sobriety and solemnity, until ol' Roger Rabbit Thaddeus saw the name of the Judge on the podium and started heehawing like a jackass in heat. The sign read, "Honorable Justice Douglas Fair presiding."

OMGWTFLOL, we were facing Judge Fair. Not Judge Mercy, nor Judge Stern, nor justices Mean, Harsh, or Crushinglingsarcasticandsadistic. No, this time we were up against a paragon of American legal legend. I could hardly wait.

As it turned out, Judge Fair pretty much lived up to his name. When it was my turn in the dock, I got a spare 30 days to pay my debt to society (or more specifically the Edmonds pothole fund), which pretty much made the $5 of gas I'd burned to go worth it. Any time you can Toranaga a debt without a penalty, do it.

"Fair" is a slippery idea, one that mutates almost at whim and certainly in any context. Moreover, it's menacing. For centuries, religions of any and every ilk have held The Last Judgment over the heads of their flocks, dancing Judge Fair around like a Uzi-wielding skeleton in a black robe. We are hopeless sinners, they intone, we are all worthless wastes of protoplasm. Under the circumstances, we are advised to crawl upon our bellies like reptiles and beg for mercy. Judge Fair, it seems, is a powerful motivator.

In truth, though, neuropsych has been unable to determine any quality of human consciousness that physically relates to an abstract sense of fairness. What they have found, on the other hand, is one mother of a sense of what's unfair. Five year olds and lower primates alike seem to have a lawyer's perception of injustice, especially and particularly and exclusively when it involves themselves. Adults may be more nuanced in their judgments, but despite thousands of years of legislation and legal theorization, gaming the law continues to be the real sport of kings and other scoundrels, and their battlecry, one and all, is "It's not fair!"

It all stems from one unfortunate truth: justice is a myth, injustice is the norm. We can know Fair only through the veil of Unfair -- it's a ghost, a shadow, the abstract opposite of our everyday experience of endless oxen endlessly gored. We can no more escape the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune than we can the need to breathe. I've theorized before (if by "theorize" I mean "blather") that one of the prime causes of human suffering is what I dubbed the Gimme Gotcha: Everyone perceives inequality as injustice, but equality is by nature impossible. Just for the sake of peace and quiet in the tribe, not to mention hunting and cultivation and procreation and all those good things that keep the tribe afloat, it's necessary to invent some kind of consistent system to sort out the most egregious examples of inequity.

Hence, laws. And police. And courts. And, inevitably, Judge Fair, enjoined to distinguish the genuine violations of The Code from the spurious pamper-pooping crybaby complaints and the weasel in the woodpile would-be hackers. Plus, of course, fulfilling the duty of Gödel Filter on The Code Itself, unsnarling the inevitable inconsistencies that crop up in a system built of axioms attempting to comprehensively define anything. It's a dirty, thankless job, but somebody has to do it.

I've often thought that there's a lot of potential in turning jurisprudence over to computation. Between fuzzy logic, artificial neural networks and Bayesean statistics, surely an even remotely advanced cyber-analysis could render a legal decision as subtle and high-minded as the average circuit court robe-rack. Why, it could be a new era! Scientific Justice! No more human thumbs on the scales! Think of the money we'd save!

But no. The great majority of h. sapiens sapiens would probably react to being weighed in the balance by Judge Roboto about as well as a sandbox full of first graders being rousted back to class by the playground supervisor, without even the supervisor's Mean Face as mitigating influence. Come to think of it, I might just be with them.

All things considered, I'm a pretty good man. And if I'm not, I guess I have it coming. I'll take my chances with Judge Fair, assuming he (or she -- his wife is a judge too, in Everett) continues to fulfill the duties of his office and titular role, even considering that ancient maxim that is the unofficial motto of every judge, jury or playground supervisor from Hammurabi on down: "In the next world, you'll get justice. In this one, you're stuck with the law."

Fair enough.


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