Posner dicta

What is often bracing about Richard Posner's writing is not merely the ideas, but the no-nonsense way he expresses them. Along with his own fascinating blog, this week he's guest-blogging at Leiter Reports.

His first post was on religion, morality and public policy. It's worth reading. Responding to some comments, he added a few paragraphs on the main misconceptions of law students. I can't resist quoting a portion:

"There are two, and they are closely related. The first is the idea that the law exists somewhere, in a book presumably (or, to be modern, in an electronic database), and that what you learn in law school is how to find the book, and that what law professors do, to justify making you sit in class for three years, is hide the book from you. The second misconception is that legal reasoning is something special, subtle, esoteric, which will enable you once you have learned it to answer a question in a way that would make no sense to a lay person. In other words--and this is what joins the misconceptions--law is a mystery.

"....[I]t should be possible to explain everything in law in perfectly simple, everyday, common sense terms. That should be the law student's, the lawyer's, and the judge's creed."