On Privacy

What has struck many observers by now is the failure of the ordinary system of legal checks to assist the country in a time of constitutional crisis. The failure has several dimensions: the arrogance of the courts, which stripped a president of the security of office and the trust of friendship; the bureaucratic timidity of the Justice Department, which allowed the independent counsel to pursue his revisions of the Constitution without challenge; above all, the silence of the legal profession, from which some stirrings of indignation might have been expected in a society where respect for the law and the perpetuation of liberty are not accidentally related. But perhaps the mistake was ours, too. We have relied on lawyers too much for our liberty—forgetting that they are all in some degree legalists, and the best of them necessarily pieceworkers. The Supreme Court looked on Paula Jones’s civil suit as a thing to itself, a piece they were not obliged to set in any larger picture. ...