Deem
|
|
To deem is the anti-Cunis; it is to treat one thing as the other.
It is of a piece with the equivalent the asset you return under a stock loan that is, but simultaneously is not, the same as the one you borrowed, the fungible security of the same type and class and forming part of the same series. The same sort of Heath Robinson logic applies to a liability in “an amount equal to the amount that you borrowed”, and these apocalyptic horsemen line up on the ridge and gaze across a deep ontological chasm at all that which amends, supplements or modifies. Between these high points, deep in the abyss below, flows the great River Pedantry which, over millennia, has carved these magnificent cliffs, canyons, craggy edifices of legal idiom.
For where to “amend” is to assert the identity over a period of time — the continued legal existence, even — of something that is in some way changed, to deem is to assert the momentary non-identity of something that, in every way, has not. It is to take Theseus’ ship to a whole other realm of ontological redundancy.
This essential subjunctivity - the hypothetical state of being one would be in were it not for the inconvenient state one actually is in, is a fundamental part of the legal eagle’s torturous psyche.