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Sunday, February 03, 2008

The Godfather



The Godfather: "I like to drink wine more than I used to -- anyway, I'm drinking more... "

Just had a marathon viewing of Godfather I and II. A crazy insight into a world spent in the dark, in a world without "justice". Some students in the LLM took jurisprudence last semester and had to justify that the Mafia is in fact a legitimate system of law. It has rules that people must follow. There is a sovereign. There is the idea of punishment. There is judgement by the sovereign for stepping outside the rules. The idea that the Mafia could be considered a system of law forces us to challenge our (mis)-conception that inherent in the idea of law, is the idea of justice. Law is what you make of it, and what it makes of itself. It is how it is implemented, and who by. It does not guarantee that outcomes be "Just". It merely guarantees that outcomes be representative of the society in which that system of law exists. As Michael Corleoni says: "It's not personal, Sonny. It's strictly business."

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