Evolution by natural selection

The greatest scientific achievement — or not science at all?

Well, I told you I was a contrarian, didn’t I?

Here’s how evolution actually works in a legal context. Lawyers are like genes. They are mindless replicating engines. It is what they do: they spawn. They combine to create contracts. The contracts have variations in them. Good contracts that are fit for a given purpose will replicate more easily than bad ones that are not. T hey will evolve, not towards a perfect golden mean, but away from the imperfect gerrymandered place in which we find ourselves today, and into an imperfect gerrymandered one we’ll be in tomorrow.

The purpose of this evolution is not the one you think.

The contract, remember, is merely a phenotype; a vehicle for replicating its genes, the selfish lawyers. It is not a replicator in itself. The best kind of contract will generate lots of little places for lawyers to secrete themselves away, snuggling into the toasty folds of its nested relative clauses, secreting roe on its boilerplate, feeding happily on its juicy words. The lawyers will contribute to their host, spewing out without limitations, for the avoidances of doubt, chewing up and recycling the words that no one else, other than another legal replicator, will ever read or understand, much less, once they are written and filed, care about.

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