The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.
Interpretation
The law is flawed and often does not lead to true justice, but can produce just outcomes under certain conditions.
In this quote, Raymond Chandler highlights the inherent imperfections of legal systems, suggesting that they are merely mechanistic tools designed to function under specific conditions. While itβs possible for justice to emerge from the law, it often requires a combination of luck and precise circumstances, emphasizing that the pursuit of justice is complicated by the limitations of legal frameworks.
In practice
During a debate about criminal justice reform, this quote can highlight the flaws in the legal system.
Undoubtedly the stories about them [hard-boiled detectives] had a fantastic element. Such things happened, but not so rapidly, nor to so close-knit a group of people, nor within so narrow a frame of logic. This was inevitable because the demand was for constant action; if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.
Organized crime is the dirty side of the sharp dollar.
When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.
The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.
If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.
All rational action is in the first place individual action. Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons. Only the individual acts.
Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.
Perhaps someone will have seen mine, the one Iβm waiting for, just as I saw him, in a ditch when his hands were making their last appeal and his eyes no longer could see. Someone who will never know what that man was to me; someone whose name Iβll never know.
I know that every time I list something that I am, I am potentially alienating a whole group of people. Publicists and managers will encourage you not to say what political party you belong to, what you eat, what you don't eat, who you sleep with and all that stuff.
You know, of course, that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct.
Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries.
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