Just finished watching 'Making a Murderer' series. While studying legality in politics, I came across a lot that I felt was 'unfair'. As annoying as that word is, it is an important concept. "Fair" is never an answer, you will learn in any law school. But it is always a consideration.
Hanya Yanagihara in his bestseller 'A Little Life' states that there's a period in which every law student - every good law student - 'finds that their vision shifts, somehow, and realises that the law is inescapable, that no interaction, no aspect of daily life escapes its long, graspy fingers. A street becomes a shocking disaster, a riot of violations, and potential civil lawsuits. A marriage looks like a divorce. The world becomes temporarily unbearable'.
So in Steve Avery's case, the words 'right' and 'wrong' and 'fair' and 'unfair' have very little to do with it. What is the law. What does the law say? Yanagihara goes on to say that a law professor in his story would, whenever those words were mentioned, 'say nothing and walk over to the offender, hand him a little slip of paper (a stack of which he kept in his jacket pocket) that read: Drayman 241.' Drayman 241 was the philosophy department in the book.
'Fairness is a concept taught to nice children: it is the governing concept of kindergarten and summer camps and playgrounds and soccer fields....fairness is for happy people. For people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities.' I love that quote. It witnesses to people who have seen how ugly life can actually be, how gritty it feels when clenched between teeth.
The law, however, is simple. It allows for less nuance than you can imagine. Does this mean 'right' and 'wrong' are for unhappy people? Maybe for those who are scarred, or scared? Ethics and morals, do, in fact, have a place in the law - although not in jurisprudence. A Little Life sums it up so well in this one line: 'it is morals that help us make the laws, but morals do not help us apply them'.
