to Constitutional Law

They have very few laws, because, with their social system, very few laws are required. Indeed, one of their great complaints against other countries is that, although they've already got books and books of laws and interpretations of laws, they never seem to have enough. For, according to the Utopians, it's quite unjust for anyone to be bound by a legal code which is too long for an ordinary person to read right through, or too difficult for him to understand.

What's more, they have no barristers to be over-ingenious about individual cases and point of law. They think it better for each man to plead his own cause, and tell the judge the same story as he'd otherwise tell his lawyer. Under such conditions, the point at issue is less likey to be obscured, and it's easier to get at the truth- for, if nobody's telling the sort of lies that one learns from lawyers, the judge can aply all his shrwedness to weighing the facts aof the case, and protecting simple-minded characters aginst the unscrupulous attacks of clever ones.

This arrangement wouldn't work very well in other countries, because there's such a mass of complicated legislation to deal with. But in Utopia everyone's a legal expert, for the simple reason that they are, as I said, very few laws, and the crudest interpretation is always assumed to be the best one. They say the only purpose of a law is to remind people what they ought to do, so the more ingenious the interpretation, the less effective the law, since proportionately fewer people will understand it- whereas the simple and obvious meaning stares everyone in the face.