We often treat the laws we all live by as neutral and self-enforcing. They are neither.

All laws are written, legislated, and enforced by humans. Often with very different understandings of what they mean.

Therefore laws don’t simply arrive. Nor do they simply begin – or pre-exist us. And we all know that laws don’t simply enforce themselves.

Despite this, we insist on treating the law itself as neutral. We treat its enforcers as neutral. And with this neutrality, we somehow make them non-participants. It’s like the people enforcing the law aren’t even there in the eyes of the law.

Laws that discriminate don’t appear out of nowhere.

And laws don’t make traffic stops.

There is a whole layer of false neutrality we place upon the entire legal framework. One that serves to isolate us from the inherent complexity of the legal system itself.

The laws which presently govern a city, state, and country were all written by people. They were ratified by people that we elected to office. And those laws are administered by police officers, attorneys, and judges. All of whom we entrust with maintaining a just society which adheres to laws.

But when our police officers, attorneys, and judges don’t respect the nature of our laws and display a clear bias, we must avoid offering them the imprimatur of distant neutrality.

We hold nobody responsible.

In claiming neutrality, both in the law itself and in each person’s practice of law, we are creating a system that bears virtually no accountability for any of its practitioners. From lawmakers to beat cops to justices of the Supreme Court.

We allow these many individuals to bear ever greater and greater power and yet almost no responsibility for it.

We often argue that the systems will maintain themselves. Much like my laundry and dishes wash themselves.

Just as much as a law cannot write you a speeding ticket, the law doesn’t arrest, try, or convict a teenager who travels to another state and shoots three people.

And when a different teenager is treated completely differently by the people who enforce the law, we cannot honestly say the law or its application are neutral. For if we dare say the law is neutral, we ignore the ways practitioners abuse that neutrality.

Neutral laws don’t support such disparate outcomes.

We have not arrived at the present disparity of outcomes through neutral laws or the neutral application of law. Lawmakers use the appearance of neutrality to legislate disparate racial and political outcomes. And courts apply laws differently based on the race and home community of the defendants.

But the court refuses to let us say this. Even with the statistical evidence in our hands.

Of course, this isn’t only about race. Consider also the 14th Amendment. In 1868, we amended the constitution to grant civil rights to all persons. And that amendment has been used dozens of times to protect the rights of individuals. It has also been used three-fold more times to protect the rights of corporations over the rights of people.

We all want the law (and its application) to be neutral. But people are using that very desire for neutrality to legitimize inequality under the law. That is neither a neutral position, nor one we can be neutral toward.

Think about what being neutral toward neutrality means. It is quite similar to an officer remaining “neutral” in light of a crime being committed. We certainly want them to act. Obviously this is a different use of the term. But, it is this confusion that is used to prevent our building of a more equal judicial system.

Laws don’t interpret or enforce themselves. Nor do they protect themselves from gross injustice.

We must write good laws to remind us that it’s always about people.