Justice & Law Quote by Dashiell Hammett

Hammett makes bureaucracy sound like a bad lounge act: all “chat” and “repast,” a flurry of polite verbs masking the hard fact that power doesn’t have to listen. The sentence performs the very evasiveness it reports. Nobody petitions; nobody argues; nobody even “asks.” They chat. They repast. The language is so domesticated it turns the Supreme Court into a social club where access is granted not by rights or procedure but by appetite and mood.

That choice isn’t accidental. Hammett, the hard-boiled architect of American cynicism, knew how institutions launder brutality through etiquette. “Our lawyers” are intermediaries in a system that rewards proximity, not justice. And the court, supposedly the final arbiter, is reduced to a set of individual preferences: “whether they wanted to hear us out.” The subtext is contemptuous: your case isn’t evaluated on merit; it’s auditioned, if the panel feels like it.

The phrasing also hints at backroom soft power. A Supreme Court justice doesn’t ordinarily have “a chat” with lawyers about whether the court might “hear us out” like it’s a dinner invitation. Hammett’s sentence suggests either a world where informal influence is normal, or a speaker so accustomed to being stonewalled that even minimal contact feels like progress. Either way, the effect is the same: institutions preserve their authority by sounding reasonable while remaining noncommittal, and the petitioner’s desperation is smuggled in under the smiley vocabulary of civility.