From: blanc <blancw@cnw.com>
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 00:01:05 -0700 (PDT)
To: "'cypherpunks@toad.com>
Subject: RE: legality of wiretapping: a "key" distinction
Message-ID: <01BBB63F.77631E40@king1-10.cnw.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


From:	Black Unicorn [in reply to Vlad the Conqueror]

I understand that it's difficult for you to grasp how firmly entrenched
the concept of wiretapping is in law enforcement, courts and the
legislature, and that your novel new approach has been tried before.
..................................................................


This should help him understand it.   I won't say who this quote is from, but he was a very respected French author:

	"Both the English and the Americans have kept the law of precedents; that is to say, they still derive their opinions in legal matters and the judgements they should pronounce from the opinions and legal judgements of their fathers. [...]

	The English or American lawyer who thus, in a sense, denies his own reasoning powers in order to return to those of his fathers, maintaining his thought in a kind of servitude, must contract more timid habits and conservative inclinations than his opposite number in France.

	Our written laws are often hard to understand, but everyone can read them, whereas nothing could be more obscure, and out of reach of the common man, than a law founded on precedent.  Where lawyers are absolutely needed, as in England and the United States, and their professional knowledge is held in high esteem, they become increasingly separated from the people, forming a class apart.  A French lawyer is just a man of learning, but an English or an American one is somewhat like the Egyptian priests, being, as they were, the only interpreter of an occult science. [...]

	Thus it is England, above all that supplies the most striking portrait of the type of lawyer I am trying to depict; the English lawyer values laws not because they are good but because they are old; and if he is reduced to modifying them in some respect, to adapt them to the changes which time brings to any society, he has recourse to the most incredible subtleties in order to persuade himself that in adding something to the work of his fathers he has only developed their thought and completed their work.  Do not hope to make him recognize that he is an innovator; he will be prepared to go to absurd lengths rather than to admit himself guilty of so great a crime.  It is in England that this legal spirit was born, which seems indifferent to the substance of things, paying attention only to the letter, and which would rather part company with reason and humanity than with the law."

   ..
Blanc