When I first entered university, I was young and inexperienced. Looking around me at the time, it became painfully evident that I had not been exposed to the shady side of life. The obvious choice was to include a few Law subjects in my curriculum, which I did.
It's is a decision that I shall never regret. I still don't know anything about the Law, but just being able to throw out a couple of Latin maxims at the right time, always ensured that I got invited to the next dinner party. After all, I was reasonably presentable, a frugal eater and I didn't charge by the hour.
Enough of that now. Let me not be distracted by trivial reminiscences that might give you the impression that I regret having aged and that I'm now ready to try and disguise the process with the help of the surgeon's scalpel. On the contrary. I no longer enjoy dinner parties. So it doesn't matter.
Quite early in the introductory course, I had my first disagreement with the Law. It pertained to the test of the reasonable man. Why would the courts always refer to the reasonable man and not to the reasonable woman? That sounded too sexist for my taste.
It is true that they tried to counterbalance the situation by depicting Justice as a woman, but you only had to look at the figure to conclude immediately that it had been conceived by a man. The scales looked right, the sword looked right, but the blindfold looked inappropriate. Have you ever met a woman who goes blindly through life?
My second brush with the Law came when I was introduced to the maxim that clearly states that ignorance of the Law is no excuse. How can it not be an excuse? With parliaments, largely made up of lawyers, creating laws so that the unobservant citizen might break them the moment he sets foot on the street, one would have to be superhuman to be aware of all the crap they throw out to justify their royal salaries.
At that point I gave up on the idea of becoming a lawyer. I decided to lead the life of an honest man. Yet, Latin maxims still amuse me.
