"It is strange how little harm bad codes do"
About this Quote
Law likes to flatter itself as society's operating system: get the code wrong and everything crashes. Pollock punctures that vanity with a judge's dry-eyed empiricism. "It is strange" is doing work here. He's not praising bad drafting; he's registering a recurring courtroom astonishment that defective statutes often fail to produce the catastrophe their critics predict. The line carries the quiet heresy that order is more resilient, and legal text less omnipotent, than lawyers prefer to believe.
The subtext is institutional humility. "Bad codes" can mean clumsy language, inconsistent provisions, even grand reform projects that overpromise. Pollock is pointing to the shock absorber effect of lived practice: judges interpret around absurdities, administrators improvise, lawyers bargain in the shadow of outcomes, and citizens mostly follow norms that precede any legislative update. In other words, the system runs on custom, discretion, and social pressure as much as on black-letter commands. Bad code may be embarrassing, but it is rarely the sole author of harm.
Context matters: Pollock sits in an era when codification was both fashionable and feared in Anglo-American legal culture, a push to rationalize messy common law into neat statutory architecture. His remark reads like a common-law jurist's sly rebuttal to the codifiers' missionary zeal. It's also a warning aimed inward: if "bad codes" do little harm, then "good codes" may do less good than advertised. The judge's power - interpretation, enforcement, choice of remedy - becomes the real lever, which is both reassuring (the system adapts) and unsettling (the system depends on fallible humans).
The subtext is institutional humility. "Bad codes" can mean clumsy language, inconsistent provisions, even grand reform projects that overpromise. Pollock is pointing to the shock absorber effect of lived practice: judges interpret around absurdities, administrators improvise, lawyers bargain in the shadow of outcomes, and citizens mostly follow norms that precede any legislative update. In other words, the system runs on custom, discretion, and social pressure as much as on black-letter commands. Bad code may be embarrassing, but it is rarely the sole author of harm.
Context matters: Pollock sits in an era when codification was both fashionable and feared in Anglo-American legal culture, a push to rationalize messy common law into neat statutory architecture. His remark reads like a common-law jurist's sly rebuttal to the codifiers' missionary zeal. It's also a warning aimed inward: if "bad codes" do little harm, then "good codes" may do less good than advertised. The judge's power - interpretation, enforcement, choice of remedy - becomes the real lever, which is both reassuring (the system adapts) and unsettling (the system depends on fallible humans).
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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