Honestly, I have a bone to pick with legal language.
I think it puts the cart before the horse. Law as a concept is an incredible invention, but I think we in our present often forget that it IS an invention: it’s a technology that was developed to systematize our ability to limit and remedy harm.
However we frequently ignore the fact that people will always shape their behavior to avoid consequence while looking for ways to serve their interests at the expense of the public good. And then when they do, we often act as if law is itself a kind of natural law, and if we can find no category for the behavior we abhor, that means that we must accept that they have some right to do it, as thought it’s out of our hands.
This situation is a profound demonstration of all of it. South Africa’s system of apartheid is a very useful framework for understanding the systems used to maintain Palestinians as a permanent underclass unable to gain meaningful political agency. This fact – that apartheid is a useful framework for examining the Israeli system and determining what to do about it – is true regardless of whether the system in question fulfills a definition. The definition is supposed to be useful. If you don’t think the term applies, that’s just a reflection that the definition apparently needs to be updated, because the thing the definition describes exists regardless of whether our language presently communicates it.
Language – like law – is a man-made tool that is supposed to serve us, not the other way around.
You should use it in the legal sense :)
Honestly, I have a bone to pick with legal language.
I think it puts the cart before the horse. Law as a concept is an incredible invention, but I think we in our present often forget that it IS an invention: it’s a technology that was developed to systematize our ability to limit and remedy harm.
However we frequently ignore the fact that people will always shape their behavior to avoid consequence while looking for ways to serve their interests at the expense of the public good. And then when they do, we often act as if law is itself a kind of natural law, and if we can find no category for the behavior we abhor, that means that we must accept that they have some right to do it, as thought it’s out of our hands.
This situation is a profound demonstration of all of it. South Africa’s system of apartheid is a very useful framework for understanding the systems used to maintain Palestinians as a permanent underclass unable to gain meaningful political agency. This fact – that apartheid is a useful framework for examining the Israeli system and determining what to do about it – is true regardless of whether the system in question fulfills a definition. The definition is supposed to be useful. If you don’t think the term applies, that’s just a reflection that the definition apparently needs to be updated, because the thing the definition describes exists regardless of whether our language presently communicates it.
Language – like law – is a man-made tool that is supposed to serve us, not the other way around.