Posner and Hills: Intellectuals and Anti-Intellectuals

Hills objects to intentional impenetrable intellectual writing. Posner defends such writing as not a sign of bad faith.

The problem is that both are lawyers. Those with filthy hands should not point fingers. In the law, legal language inscrutability is a bigger problem for those being put to death, and those losing $billions due to misunderstanding, esoteric rules no one understands, and lawyer gotcha. The latter is a form of bad faith.

1) The French administrators of England taught the lawyer how to speak incomprehensibly. Dense language generates income and power.

2) Such dense language is a form of rent seeking, requiring hiring the lawyer as a decoder. Judge Posner may have an IQ of 300, but he forgot this theory in his law and economics book. It explains most anomalous lawyer policies.

3) The public owns the law, as if a toaster. It is his chattel. The dense language of the lawyer represents a conversion of the chattel by the law technician. As such, all lawyer utterances with readability scores above the sixth grade should be unlawful, and void per se. It should be a presumption that such language is in bad faith and a form of theft.