Donald Trump was cleared of rape charges, but with what appears to be no evidence was somehow found guilty of battery and defamation even though the witness was evidently not credible enough for her main charge to persuade even this obviously sympathetic jury.

Alan Dershowitz assessed the situation this way:

I think this is a Rorschach verdict. If you believe in what I wrote in my book, that there is a get Trump mentality, that they're out to get him no matter what the circumstances are, you'll say this is just another example.

But the jury at least had the good sense of saying no rape. Now, for me, the critical fact is: she swore under oath she was raped. The jury found that she did not tell the truth.... They disbelieved her on the crucial issue of rape. So how did they believe her on the other issues of sexual assault and defamation? This is an appeal that should be won, and I would expect it would be won if the defendant's name was not Donald Trump.

As the great Robert Barnes put it, "The big flaw in the lawfare against Trump is Trump-haters' belief that ordinary Americans will accept the action of juries and judges as an honest, non-partisan judgment of the facts. Problem for them is nobody in America believes judges or juries anymore."

I'm not so sure that's true (the not believing judges and juries anymore part), but if it's not true yet it soon will be, with the courts generating more and more obviously political outcomes.

Conservatives like to console themselves that we have something called "the rule of law," but there are two problems here. One is that the law is increasingly being used to punish people the regime dislikes, and look the other way at crimes committed by people perceived as supporters. It's similar to what Sam Francis called anarcho-tyranny.

The other problem is that even if this open and obvious assault on the impartiality of the law weren't occurring before our eyes, the "rule of law" is, as Professor John Hasnas of Georgetown put it, a myth. His classic treatment comes in the form of a 1995 article for the Wisconsin Law Review called "The Myth of the Rule of Law."

One of the principles drummed into us, and by which our consent to the system is engineered, is the idea that we live under a set of neutral legal principles that unbiased experts can apply objectively to produce predictable and just results. Not human whim but impartial legal principle governs how the courts operate: that in a nutshell is the idea of the rule of law.

Comforting as this myth may be, it is a myth all the same -- and an especially insidious one at that, because it misleads us into lending unjustified support to the existing power structure in the U.S., which the myth portrays as the very embodiment of impartial justice.

You probably won't be convinced without reading the Hasnas article for yourself, and in fact for years after I myself read it I refused to accept its conclusions. I could take libertarians' anti-state arguments only so far. Surely this principle, at least, must be valid!

At any rate, Hasnas writes:

Unlike the laws of nature, political laws are not consistent. The law human beings create to regulate their conduct is made up of incompatible, contradictory rules and principles; and, as anyone who has studied a little logic can demonstrate, any conclusion can be validly derived from a set of contradictory premises. This means that a logically sound argument can be found for any legal conclusion....

Because the law is made up of contradictory rules that can generate any conclusion, what conclusion one finds will be determined by what conclusion one looks for.... This will invariably be the one that intuitively “feels” right, the one that is most congruent with one’s antecedent, underlying political and moral beliefs. Thus, legal conclusions are always determined by the normative assumptions of the decisionmaker.... [Emphasis added.]

Even if the law were consistent, the individual rules and principles are expressed in such vague and general language that the decisionmaker is able to interpret them as broadly or as narrowly as necessary to achieve any desired result.

You believe that the law can be reformed; that to bring about an end to political strife and institute a true rule of law, we merely need to create a legal system comprised of consistent rules that are expressed in clear, definite language.

It is my sad duty to inform you that this cannot be done. Even with all the good will in the world, we could not produce such a legal code because there is simply no such thing as uninterpretable language.

Now the law is obviously not radically indeterminate; the outcome of every legal case isn't a toss-up. But that, says Hasnas, has to do more with the ideological and social commonalities of the people who serve as judges than it does with the "rule of law," and as the lunacy in the law schools is making clear, those commonalities have been breaking down.

As Robert Barnes told me on the Tom Woods Show, lots of would-be lawyers in law schools these days appear to take for granted that the purpose of the law is to impose a progressive vision of society on the rest of us.

The way to fight against that isn't to appeal to a "rule of law" that means nothing to such people, but to fight to get on the bench half-sane people who aren't at war with everything you cherish.