Thirty-four times a jury of ordinary citizens said guilty this fortnight, to a former and possibly future president, and the remarkable thing was how little the ground moved. The polls held. The party closed ranks. The convicted man raised money off the conviction. And in that non-reaction lies a truth about law that jurisprudence has always known and civics class never teaches: that a verdict is not a force of nature but a shared belief, and that its power over the powerful lasts exactly as long as the belief does, and not one moment longer.
The legal scholar Robert Cover opened his most famous essay with a sentence worth carrying around: no set of legal institutions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning; for every constitution there is an epic, for each law a story of what the law means and why we are bound by it. Law, in this understanding, is not fundamentally the statute or the sentence; it is the story a society tells itself about which commands are binding and on whom, and the statute is merely that story written down. A conviction is a speech act that works by being believed, the way money is paper that works by being trusted; and just as a currency can collapse in an afternoon when the belief behind it evaporates while the paper remains physically unchanged, a verdict can be rendered inert not by being overturned but by being widely treated as not mattering, the ink intact, the binding force gone.
Let me put the strongest objection with full force, because it is the objection of everyone who reveres the rule of law and finds this whole line of argument corrosive. The law, they will say, is precisely not mere belief; it is objective, written, procedural, enforced by courts and marshals and prisons that exist whether or not anyone approves, and to reduce it to a story people happen to tell is to hand the cynic his favorite weapon, the claim that law is only power in a wig, which is exactly the claim that authoritarians use to justify ignoring it. I take this seriously, and I share the fear behind it. But I would put it the other way. It is precisely because I revere the rule of law that I insist on naming its true foundation, because a thing you wish to protect you must first see clearly, and the comforting fiction that law enforces itself is what leaves us unprepared for the moment it does not. The marshals and prisons are real, yes, but they too are staffed by people who obey the law only because they believe they must, and the day enough of them, or enough of the public that empowers them, decide that the law does not really bind this particular man, no statute on the books will reach up and enforce itself.
This is not an abstract fear to me, and here I will be personal, because my own people have long lived on the side of the law where its promises were most obviously belief and least obviously binding. I grew up understanding that a right written down is not a right possessed; that the same constitution guarantees everyone equal protection and delivers it selectively; that whether the law protects you or merely claims to depends on whether the society believes, in its gut, that you are the kind of person the law is for. So when I watch a conviction of a powerful man produce a collective shrug, I do not see a technicality. I see the belief that binds the strong being tested in public, and I see how thin it always was, and I know from my own history that when that belief thins, it thins first around the powerful and the despised alike, protecting neither.
So the conviction was necessary and it was right, and it may also turn out to have been a demonstration of the law's limit rather than its reach, and both of those can be true. Twelve citizens did their part perfectly; the story held in that room. The question the fortnight leaves is whether it holds outside it, whether a society still believes that its most powerful man is bound by the same word as its least, because that belief is the entire load-bearing wall, and walls do not announce that they are failing. They simply, one day, are found to have been holding nothing up. The verdict was strong. Whether it binds is not up to the jury. It is up to us, and the early returns are a shrug.