Entering the Bramble Bush

I've started reading Karl Llewellyn's lectures collected in The Bramble Bush, the 2008 Oxford University Press edition, and found these passages from Chapter 1. I may be republishing other interesting excerpts as I find them. Emphases are are in the original.

... We have discovered in our teaching of the law that general propositions are empty. We have discovered that students who come eager to learn the rules and who do lean them, and who learn nothing more, will take away the shell and not the substance. We have discovered that rules alone, mere forms of words, are worthless. We have learned that the concrete instance, the heaping up of concrete instances, the present vital memory of a multitude of concrete instances, is necessary in order to make any general proposition, be it rule of law or any other, mean anything at all. Without the concrete instance the general proposition is baggage, impedimenta, stuff about the feet. It not only does not help. It hinders. ...

... You may have missed in this discussion the common idea that the law is right, that rules of law are to be obeyed because they are right, that men have duties to uphold the law. Such ideas are not missing because they have been overlooked. They are left out because you may fairly be expected to be well aware of them already. They are left out, too, because they contain truth so partial, so faulty, as to cry out for revision in the light of some such analysis as I have been presenting. They are left out because at this stage of your approach to law your common sense is rather in the way than otherwise. Let me here say only this about rightness of the law. That if most people did not stand behind the officials, however passively, there would be little law to talk about. That if most people did not most of the time when they looked at a rule look to its purpose as well as to its exact and narrow form, and fit their conduct roughly to that purpose, then the officials would have been a burden on their hands they could not bear. And, finally, that if most people shaped their conduct really with reference to the law and to their legal rights, for any serious fraction of their time, rather than with reference to the patterns of action, the patterns of thought, the standards of judgment which they inhale as the social atmosphere they breathe, then life in our society would become unlivable. ...

I offer this in part as a response to those who look at the actions of those responsible for the current crisis in mortgage backed securities and who say "nevertheless, what they did was legal". This would also be applicable to those who excuse the actions of our government's agents toward those in its detention centers because of some technical justification by the Bush Administration's Office of Legal Counsel. Just because someone can twist the words of the law to justify reprehensible actions doesn't make those actions any less wrong.