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Chapter 24: The Ten Commandments of Law

The frivolous lawsuit had lit a fire in Julian. The righteous, analytical anger he felt had a new, sharp focus. He walked into the war room the next morning with the energy of a man who had just discovered a fundamental flaw in the laws of physics.

“Forget agricultural subsidies,” he announced to the assembled team. “That’s a rounding error. We have a bigger problem. A foundational one.”

He stood before a clean whiteboard, a black marker in his hand. “I spent last night reading,” he said. “I read the Code of Hammurabi. I read the Justinian Code. I read the Magna Carta. And I read the first ten pages of the current United States Federal Tax Code, at which point my will to live began to falter.”

A ripple of nervous laughter went through the room.

“The problem with our legal system is not a bug,” he stated. “It is a design philosophy. A catastrophically flawed one. Our society has abandoned first principles. We have become obsessed with attempting to legislate for every possible contingency, to account for every nuisance, to pre-empt every conceivable bad-faith argument. The result is not a system of justice. It is a monstrous, bloated, incomprehensible accretion of rules that no single human being can possibly understand.”

He drew a simple, elegant box on the board. Inside it, he wrote: THE LAW MUST BE SIMPLE.

“This is the first principle,” he said. “A law that cannot be understood by a normal person, a high-school graduate, even a person who is not well-educated, without the help of a paid, specialist translator—a lawyer—is not a just law. It is a barrier. It is a tool for the powerful and a trap for the unwary.”

He then drew ten simple lines. “The great legal codes of history were powerful because they were simple. They were based on a handful of core, intuitive principles that everyone could understand. The Ten Commandments are not a thousand pages long. They are a set of general directions for a functioning society.”

He turned to the team, his eyes blazing with the intensity of his new idea. “We have to go back. Our legal reform will be a Great Simplification. We will propose that the primary job of the United States Congress for the next decade should not be to pass new laws, but to repeal old ones.”

“For every single law and regulation on the books,” he continued, “a commission will ask one simple question: What is the absolute worst societal outcome if this law did not exist? And can that outcome be just as effectively addressed by a simpler, more general, and more fundamental law, like ‘You should not steal’ or ‘You should not defraud’?”

Marcus Thorne looked skeptical. "You're declaring war on the entire legal profession, Julian. And you're framing this as a populist 'eat the rich' policy. The wealthy will fight you tooth and nail."

"You're wrong, Marcus," Julian countered calmly. "This isn't about attacking the rich. A simplified system will benefit them, too. The current system is so broken, so predatory, that it attacks everyone. Greed, armed with a team of lawyers, is always ready to strike. The wealthy are the biggest targets for frivolous, extortionate lawsuits. It has reached the point of absurdity where some of the most creative and outspoken people in our society feel that the best way to protect themselves from the legal system is to technically own nothing. That is not a sign of a healthy society. It is a sign of a legal system that has become a monster."

He began to write on the board again, his voice gaining momentum. “This is how you close the loopholes. The current system, with its thousands of pages of complexity, is a playground for lawyers and the wealthy. They can always find a loophole. Trump’s use of bankrupt subsidiaries to shield the parent company from its liabilities, Musk’s refusal to pay his bills because he knows the average person cannot afford to litigate against him—these are not failures of the law. They are features of a system that is designed to be gamed by those with enough resources.”

“But,” he continued, “a simple, principle-based law is much harder to game. A law that says, ‘A person who controls an entity is responsible for the debts of that entity,’ is a law a jury can understand. It is a law based on common sense.”

He put the marker down, the philosophical foundation of his new platform now clear. “The goal is a legal code so simple that every citizen can understand their rights and their obligations. A system where justice is determined by the facts of the case, not by the size of a party’s legal budget. We are not just proposing a marginal overhaul of the legal system. We are proposing to burn it down to its foundations and rebuild it on the bedrock of common sense.”

The Discourse, 24; The First Principles of Law

Section 24.1: A Critique of Legal Positivism

Julian Corbin's argument is a direct and radical assault on the dominant philosophy of modern law, known as legal positivism. Legal positivism, in its simplest form, holds that the law is what the sovereign (in this case, Congress and the regulatory state) says it is. It is a self-contained system of rules, and justice is the correct application of those rules, regardless of their moral or common-sense implications. This philosophy has led, over centuries, to the "monstrous, bloated accretion" that Corbin describes—a system where the sheer volume and complexity of the rules have become a barrier to, rather than a facilitator of, justice.

Corbin's proposed alternative is a return to a more classical, natural law tradition. This philosophy posits that for a law to be valid, it must align with a set of higher, universal, and easily understandable principles of morality and reason (what he metaphorically calls the "Ten Commandments"). His argument that a law must be simple enough for an intelligent citizen to understand is a direct challenge to the "priesthood" of lawyers and judges that legal positivism has created.

Section 24.2: The "Great Simplification" as a Legislative Mandate

The proposal that Congress’s primary job should be to repeal laws, not create them, is a revolutionary re-framing of the role of a legislator. In the current political system, a lawmaker's success is measured almost entirely by their legislative output—the number of bills they sponsor, the laws they pass. This creates a powerful institutional incentive for the constant creation of new, often duplicative and overly specific, legislation.

Corbin is proposing a fundamental change to this incentive structure. He is arguing that in a mature and overly complex legal system, the most valuable legislative act is no longer creation, but curation. His proposed test—"What is the worst outcome if this law did not exist?"—is a version of the medical principle of "first, do no harm." It is a call for a profound and deeply conservative (in the classic sense of the word) form of legislative humility.

Section 24.3: Simplicity as a Tool Against Corporate Power

The most counter-intuitive and powerful part of Corbin's argument is that radical legal simplification is the most effective tool for combating the abuses of corporate and wealthy power. The common assumption is that complex regulations are needed to control powerful actors. Corbin argues the opposite, a key theme of the MARG platform.

He makes the case that complexity is the friend of the powerful. Wealthy individuals and large corporations can afford to hire armies of lawyers and lobbyists to navigate, exploit, and even write the complex rules to their own advantage (a phenomenon known as "regulatory capture"). The examples of Trump and Musk are used as evidence of this. A small business owner or an individual citizen, however, is crushed by this complexity.

A simple, principle-based law ("A person who controls an entity is responsible for the debts of that entity") is far more democratic. It is easy for a jury of normal citizens to understand and to apply, and it is far more difficult for a team of expensive lawyers to argue their way around its clear, common-sense intent. In this view, legal simplicity is the ultimate tool for leveling the playing field between the powerful and the powerless.