Post by Dante on Jun 11, 2010 14:36:02 GMT -5
"I'm afraid this dreadful nonsense is the law": Legal Interpretation in The Bad Beginning
The plot of The Bad Beginning hinges on the matter of how laws and legal documents are to be interpreted. Justice Strauss, whose job it is to interpret laws, comes up with foolishly literal interpretations which both support and ultimately undermine Olaf's plot-- and which, like many other instances of stupidity and incompetence in the Series, serve to dash all hope of a happy ending.
As Klaus learns from Nuptial Law (97), the laws of "this community"(perhaps synonymous with "the city") contain a loophole: it may be possible to legally marry someone by presenting the correct ceremony in a play, since the law does not rule out this possibility. However, there is a good reason the laws would not account for such a situation-- because normally no one thinks of a theatrical marriage as legally binding, since they accept they play as fiction. Therefore, all legal actions in the play (such as the signing of a document) are only meaningful within its fictional "frame" and apply only to the characters, not the actors portraying them. Even if a real judge plays a judge, and a real document serves as a prop, legal actions presented in the play are still not legally binding. This distinction between fiction and reality is such common sense that the laws should not need to account for it, but in Snicket's world, authority figures are often lacking in common sense.
Justice Strauss takes the sort of approach to legal matters which Sunny would later denounce as "Scalia!". She believes the letter(not the spirit) of the law must be obeyed, even if it violates common sense-- and she does not consider the likely intentions of the people who wrote the laws or documents. Surely whoever wrote the laws of "this community" did not intend to make fictional marriages valid in the real world. Justice Strauss does not attempt this argument, or even to claim that the marriage is invalid because Violet was coerced. Rather, she helps Violet's desperate plan to defeat Olaf's loophole with an even more ridiculous loophole, namely, signing with her left hand to render her signature invalid(152). Strauss does not even make up her mind that Olaf is a criminal until she realizes that he has endangered Sunny(154), demonstrating that she does not consider the "marriage" to be fraudulent or unethical in itself.
This excessively literal approach to legal interpretation also creates the sequel hook at the end of The Bad Beginning. Neither Strauss nor Mr. Poe can find any way to work around the parents' will in order to let Strauss adopt the Baudelaires(160)-- even though the will is defied in later books, in which they are adopted by non-relatives. Once again, Strauss looks only at the strictly literal meaning of a legal document, and not at the intentions behind it. She does not consider the Baudelaire parents might have preferred to have a good non-relative caring for their children rather than a villain who just happens to be a distant cousin. All that matters to her is the law, even if she herself admits that it is "dreadful nonsense".