An interesting year for law

The year 2017 is interesting, historically, in the evolution of law. Five hundred years ago this year, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg cathedral, starting the protestant reformation, with subsequent centuries of court battles, wars and terror spawned by efforts of competing religious groups to see their beliefs codified into laws that bound everyone, not only co-believers.

Sixty years ago, a 184-pound metal sphere became the first man made object to orbit the earth, above our atmosphere, sending terror and shame through the U.S., which had not launched Sputnik, and spawning developments in space law and national security law. Both the 1517 and 1957 episodes contributed greatly to the civil rights movement, and to legal evolution that affects us today.

In 1517, the law in most of Europe was pretty much what the Catholic Church said that it was. Much of the "royalty" that ruled kingdoms was illiterate and dependent on clerics to write down any discussions, decisions, treaties, laws, and all the other things on which governments, then and now, depend. But by 1517, the printing press had been democratizing literacy for a few decades. Emerging vernacular texts of the Bible encouraged rulers, merchants and eventually the working classes to question their reliance on interpretations and statements by their clergy.

Given the opportunity, people will free themselves from controls imposed by others. European renaissance rulers embraced increasing literacy to provide themselves with alternatives to Church-inflected opinions of what was proper governance. Luther's theses led to rapid spread of the idea that it was possible to interpret Christian religious doctrine in a vast variety of ways, further undermining the absolute authority of Catholic Church opinion.

Rulers and ruled began to pursue laws that were not founded on Church doctrine. Rulers who had seen growing literacy as a device to escape the influence of the Catholic Church found themselves confronting ruled populations using literacy to question the government structures and rationales that kept their rulers in place.

As Sputnik crossed the sky above Cold War America, similar patterns were at work. Starting in the 1940s, as soon as WWII ended, U.S. Supreme Court decisions began overruling mandatory segregation laws. Separate seating on interstate buses and trains fell. Segregated schools were outlawed (Brown v. Board of Education was a consolidated case - far more than just Topeka, Kansas, was affected). These decisions reflected both the interests of rulers and of those ruled.

Fighting in Europe, Africa and Asia exposed Americans to unexpected cultures and cultural assumptions. Such exposure caused no less an increase in literacy than the spread of printed texts in the early 16th century. Soldiers who had fought to free the world from the horrors of Axis oppression returned home and questioned racial oppression, and the laws that enforced it, in the states they had fought to defend.

While those who were oppressed by legally enforced segregation increasingly fought against it, those who enforced it were also gaining cultural literacy about an increasingly integrated world. As the Cold War developed, the U.S. government was confronted with both international and domestic complications imposed by local and national segregation policies.

Our national policy during the Cold War was to convince nations emerging from colonial rule that our political system was better than the Soviet and Chinese systems. "Capitalism was better than Communism" was the gravamen of the argument. For the Soviets and Chinese, the repost was easy, if not always true: "Compare the racism and discrimination of the U.S., with our universal education and universal healthcare, provided to all, without favoritism."

Domestically, the policy of segregating black, Asian, Native American and Hispanic populations, and depriving these significant portions of the nation of education, took a toll on our ability to wage the Cold War. As discussed in Margot Shetterly's "Hidden Figures," as early as WWII, scientists were learning that minority populations represented a significant talent pool. As WWII and Korea gave way to the Cold War, government saw an increasing need for more and more educated people to wage the intellectual and technological battles against the commies.

As Sputnik flew around a world in which radio and television were doing what Gutenberg's press had done in the 15th century, the silly anachronisms of plantation culture were becoming as visible to the populations of post-colonial societies as they always had been to minority Americans. So, in fits and starts, and "with all deliberate speed" our governments, state and federal, started to evolve laws in ways that made "equal justice for all" more of a real promise and less of a joke.

But laws evolve in odd patterns. By 1517, 25 years after Columbus' boats didn't fall off the edge of the world, most people understood that the earth was a sphere. But a century later, in 1616, the Church ordered Galileo to stop believing that the earth orbited the sun. Sixteen years later, the Church convicted Galileo of heresy, and banned publication of his writing. While most of the "modern" world accepted heliocentrism, and the evolving understanding of geography and physics, it would be centuries before most of Europe would abandon laws barring Jews from owning land or working in many professions.

In 1957, as the federal government pushed states to educate as many scientists as possible to help win the Cold War, and move the U.S. to preeminence in the new space race, many states still insisted that only white students should be educated to a level of competence to contribute to those efforts.

Gutenberg started printing his Bible in the 1450s. Five hundred years later, transistors started revolutionizing modern communications. The computers that help develop and spread new knowledge today are built with transistors, just as Gutenberg's printing plates were built with movable bits of type. As we watch those who wield power today try to legislate against scientific realities revealed by our modern learning, and to restore the right to discriminate on religious grounds, we might do well to reflect on the fate rulers who resisted the knowledge spread by the printing press.

Thomas M. Hall is a certified specialist in family law practicing in West Los Angeles.