At risk of offending my many friends in the legal academy, I think that law is a shockingly phony discipline.  Virtually everyone – liberal, conservative, Marxist, libertarian, or whatever – imagines that the law conveniently agrees with what they favor on non-legal grounds.  Almost no one admits that many, if not most, laws are so vague that there is no “fact of the matter” about what they mean.

Once in a while, I should add, a law professor has told me this verbatim, and then gone back to arguing about the law.  The philosopher in me insists, “If there’s no such thing as unicorns, we can’t argue about unicorns,” but the Great Unicorn Debate never stops.

Actually, it’s getting worse.  Here’s the best Cynical Quote of the week, straight from Tim Kane’s latest post on the big-3 bail-out:

This also seems to be a blatant violation of the TARP, which weeks ago the administration was saying would not (and I thought legally could not) be used for industrial policy. So is it Constitutional?  It was once fashionable to re-interpret the intent of laws written decades or centuries ago. Now it seems the time horizon for creative interpretation of the law has converged to months.