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 it’s 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.
From the depths of the West of Europe, a young child will be born of poor people, he who by his tongue will seduce a great troop; his fame will increase towards the realm of the East.
I place a high moral value on the way people behave. I find it repellent to have a lot, and to behave with anything other than courtesy in the old sense of the word - politeness of the heart, a gentleness of the spirit.
The practice of arbitrary imprisonments have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.
There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.
Round numbers are always false.
The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.