What Is Law, Actually?

I didn’t start with a theory about the law. I started with a belief in the law. When I was younger, I believed what most of us are taught: That the law is an organizing principle. That people follow it not just because they’re afraid of punishment, but because it creates order, stability, and fairness. That it applies, more or less, the same way to everyone. And then I started to see the cracks.

In high school, I watched kids do real harm, and I watched some of them walk away from it. Not because they didn’t do it, but because they were white, wealthy, and protected. They had parents with access who provided insulation. For us accountability meant something different.

I saw that pattern again and again as I got older; who faces consequences, who can make them go away, who gets the benefit of interpretation.

Years later, inside MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility, that belief got challenged directly. Not by a system, by a kid.

I was working with young people who had been incarcerated, building a debate program, asking them to think critically, to argue both sides of an issue. One of them called me out, pointed out that I was holding different crimes to different standards. That I was, without realizing it, applying the same uneven logic I had grown up around. He was right. And once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.

I saw who ends up in places like MacLaren. Kids who made mistakes. Kids who caused harm. But also kids who had been failed, by family, by systems, by circumstance. Kids who told me, without irony, that being there was the most stability they had ever known. That’s not what the law is supposed to do.

And at the same time I saw the same pattern somewhere completely different; Cannabis. I was there as the ‘legal’ market was being built. In rooms full of people shaping a ‘brand new’ industry, and I looked around and noticed who was there, who had access, who had capital, who had the ability to participate in something that had, not long before, been criminal. Mostly white and resourced- the people who had been able to operate in the grey with less risk.

I also met people living the other side of that reality. A grandmother using cannabis to treat her epileptic grandson, who lost her subsidized housing because of it. People jailed for weeks because of something as small as a seed found during a search. Communities disproportionately policed, prosecuted, and stripped of assets through forfeiture laws that quietly fund the system that targets them.

The same behavior. The same substance. Legal for some, punishable for others.

And I witnessed the quieter versions of power. The ones that don’t make headlines. A city employee who decides she doesn’t like your application and uses her position to stall it. A manager who knows and does nothing. A process that looks neutral on paper, but in practice depends entirely on the discretion of the person in front of you.

I was lucky. I had access. Support. The ability to push back. I eventually got unstuck at huge cost. But I also saw how easily that situation could have gone another way and felt the terror of being subject to someone’s whim, despite doing everything ‘right’. How that same power could be used, over and over again, against people without resources.

That was new for me. I wasn’t used to encountering power like that. I had been protected from it. It’s easy to believe in fairness when you’ve mostly experienced it. It’s harder when you start to see how unevenly it’s applied. And when you start to see all of this clearly, another question emerges: What happens when people stop believing the system is fair? Because that’s where we are.

Part of what we saw in 2016, and again more recently, wasn’t just political division. It was something deeper. A willingness, from many people, to burn the system down. That doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from living in a reality where the rules don’t feel the same for everyone. Where some people can pay to avoid consequences, and others live with consequences that never seem to go away.

There’s a saying I come back to often: If the penalty for breaking a rule is a fine, then that rule only exists for people who can’t afford to pay it.

People understand that. They may not say it in policy language. But they feel it, and when that gap goes unaddressed for long enough, something shifts. Trust erodes, not all at once, but steadily.

At the same time, many of the people inside institutions are trying, in good faith, to hold things together. To defend norms, to protect what’s working. But when you’re insulated from how unevenly those systems are experienced, that defense can start to feel like denial.

When the response to frustration becomes: “trust the system” without acknowledging where it’s failing, it’s not convincing, it just creates more distance. It becomes easier to explain the anger away. To call it misinformed, or manipulated, or rooted in something else. Sometimes those things are present. But they’re not the whole story, because underneath all of it is something more fundamental: People want to live in a system where the rules mean the same thing for everyone.

When that doesn’t feel true, they don’t just disengage, some of them start looking for ways to break the system entirely. That’s not a policy failure. That’s a legitimacy crisis, and it doesn’t get solved by doubling down on the status quo.

It gets solved by being honest about what isn’t working. By listening, not ‘managing expectations.’ By being willing to confront the ways power, access, and discretion shape outcomes.

When I coached debate, my students would sometimes lose rounds they felt were unfair. Bad judging, questionable decisions, and they would want me to challenge it after the fact. I didn’t. Not because the system was perfect, but because the answer wasn’t to argue around it. It was to get better, to win so clearly that there wasn’t an argument to be had with the judge.

I think about that a lot now. Because the question in front of us isn’t whether people are frustrated. They are. We can see it everywhere.

The question is what we do with that frustration. Do we dismiss it? Channel it? Exploit it?

Or do we take it seriously enough to ask why so many people feel like the system isn’t built for them - and what it would take to change that? Because if the law is supposed to be the thing that holds us together, then it has to be something we all recognize ourselves in. Not just in theory, but in practice, and right now, too many people are living a different version of it.

If we want to pull back the curtain, if we want to rebuild trust, if we want people to believe in the system again, then the work isn’t just protecting what exists. It’s making sure the rules actually apply the same way to everyone.

Because without that, we’re not arguing about policy anymore. We’re arguing about whether the system itself is worth keeping.