{"id":1601,"date":"2013-01-16T20:27:42","date_gmt":"2013-01-17T01:27:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/hlpr\/?p=1601"},"modified":"2015-10-02T15:22:06","modified_gmt":"2015-10-02T15:22:06","slug":"burglarys-silver-lining","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/2013\/01\/16\/burglarys-silver-lining\/","title":{"rendered":"Burglary\u2019s Silver Lining"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Hudson Kingston<\/p>\n

<\/em>Last month a judge in the UK caught a fair amount of flak from everyone, up to and including the prime minister, for saying that it takes a lot of courage to commit a burglary. He received a formal reprimand, and piqued the attention of satirist\u00a0David Mitchell<\/a>,\u00a0who said<\/a>: \u201cDavid Cameron said that burglars weren\u2019t brave at all but were \u2018cowards\u2019. I don\u2019t know how he knows that but it\u2019s a good job because presumably, if they were braver, they\u2019d break into loads more places.\u201d Mitchell went on to explain that words mean something and Prime Minister Cameron made the classic mistake of assuming bad people are bad all over, and goes on: \u201cHaving established that burglary is a bad thing, he thinks linking it or its practitioners with any positive attributes, however incidental, is an idea too sophisticated for the British public to grasp.\u201d
\n
\nAfter reading this I tried to apply Mitchell\u2019s ultimate thesis \u2014 \u201c[a]t the risk of sounding like those people who go on about how the Nazis had nice uniforms, it\u2019s worth remembering that bad things often have good aspects to them\u201d \u2014 to other situations, and found it difficult. It is not easy to read about\u00a0someone<\/a>\u00a0who robbed old folks in a Ponzi scheme and then tried to bribe a court 19 million dollars, on the record, to get out of it, and then think of a nice thing to say. Granted, some\u00a0recent crimes<\/a>\u00a0have the potential to make motion picture history (especially\u00a0this one<\/a>), but it truly is \u2014 as Mitchell suggests \u2014 a rare skill to be able to point up exactly what was difficult or laudable in something that, on the whole society, views as evil.<\/p>\n

The judge in question must have seen quite a few more \u201cbad\u201d people in his court than most of us are used to confronting in one lifetime, and that could be the source of his unexpected point of view. This debate in the UK, and the judge\u2019s ability to see the humanity in an accused criminal, are heartening given thelopsided<\/a>\u00a0judiciary appointments we have seen in this country. It is nice to believe that (some) judges continue to evolve as people even after the day they were nominated. Not to be a Pollyanna, but sometimes intelligent people will\u00a0surprise<\/a>\u00a0you, even if it may be as frequent as Halley\u2019s Comet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Hudson Kingston Last month a judge in the UK caught a fair amount of flak from everyone, up to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/peZQka-pP","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/lpr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}