My money would be waiting for me after I had served my sentence, if any, or been found not guilty, like any other citizen. Assuming I lived to collect it, but more about that in a moment. In the meantime I could draw only enough money for my legal expenses. Luckily, I didn't have to hire Malcolm Malpractice, the guy with the office over the barbershop. I retained Flynn and Associates, which meant I had a full combat battalion of lawyers, clerks, assistants, investigators, and researchers at my disposal.

So the first thing I did was stab Billy in the back.

"Common sense?" he shouted. "Common sense? What's all this I'm hearing about Common Sense Court? Sparky, my friend, that's for people who didn't do it! In case you've forgotten, you did it! To find guilty people not guilty we go to a jury, Sparks! Juries are what I do!"

I said I'd prefer to take my chances with the Judge.

"Let me say this to you slowly," Billy said, slowly. "The law is an ass. The law is an ass, and I am the mule skinner."

This was happening in his luxurious office, shortly after I had almost, but not quite, admitted that I had killed my father. Not even Billy Flynn was going to hear of Elwood's role in the crime, because Elwood was not going to be any element in my defense. So what I had told him was that I no longer remembered what had happened that day (true; I also hadn't remembered it accurately on that day), and that since I and my father were the only people on the stage, it must have been me who shot him. Also true.

"A jury is the best thing that ever happened to a defendant," Billy went on. "A jury is the only existing creature with no brain and twelve assholes. Do you know how you determine the intelligence of a jury? You do not add up the IQs and divide by twelve. You take the lowest IQ and divide that by twelve.

"Juries are hazardous, I won't lie to you about that. Sometimes their sheer stupidity gets in the way and they simply never understand the right thing to do. Which is whatever I tell them to do. But nine times out of ten I can whip them along to the right verdict. With the Judge, you quite often get actual justice, which is the last thing you want."

He had been pacing around the office, delivering his peroration to a jury he hadn't even assembled yet. Now he went behind his desk and sat down, laced his fingers together, and assumed a fatherly mien. Billy Flynn affected an older appearance, with a receding hairline and gray around the temples. Probably another jury thing. He had an Adolphe Menjou moustache, and a warm, husky voice. You liked this man, almost instantly.

"Let me give you the Billy Flynn extremely short course in the Law, Sparky. After the Invasion, the dominant legal form was based on the English system of jurisprudence. People erroneously assume this system is involved in dispensing justice. It is not. It is interested solely in providing fairness, in conducting all its affairs by a set of rules. You know what those rules are and you play by them, and you win some, and you lose some. The system is largely weighted in favor of the accused. This results in oddities such as 'admissible evidence.' According to the law, how evidence is gathered is more important than its actual probative value. In other words, if the police don't play by the rules, you go free. No matter what you've done, no matter how compelling the evidence. Case dismissed. This obvious insanity is tolerated because of the 'rules.'

"Or take prejudicial testimony. If you've been convicted of ninety robberies, and are accused of a ninety-first, with exactly the same modus operandi, those prior convictions cannot be put in evidence against you. It might 'prejudice' the jury.

"The upshot is, the English system of law is by far the way to go if you are guilty.

"Of course, in recent years, another type of law has been tried...."

I could listen to the man talk all day. His arguments at the bail hearing alone were worth every penny of his outlandish fee. When he was done, even I was almost convinced I wasn't a flight risk—a man who had fled the jurisdiction and been on the run for seventy years, who had no money, no roots in the community, and absolutely nothing to lose by jumping bail... and who had in fact spent the last twenty-four hours thinking of nothing but the best way out of town if bail were granted. But in the end I would not have released me on my own recognizance, and the judge didn't, either.

At one point I told Billy Flynn he could have been a great actor.

"I am a great actor," he replied.

But he was a bit long-winded, and I wasn't taking notes. Besides, half of the power of his words were in the delivery, something every actor understands. So while I thoroughly enjoyed the two-hour diatribe he had introduced as an extremely short course in the law, I won't try to set it down here. He had much more to say about the traditional, English system. And much to say about the new system.

For there were other ways.

Even in English common law one often had the option of being tried by a judge or a jury. Trial by a wise and/or impartial judge had been the method used by many cultures before the Invasion. It often worked well. Then there was trial by a council of elders, or by an entire community. Always, there was The Law behind such systems, sometimes called "custom," sometimes written down and sometimes not. There were referees, arbitrators, mediators of all sorts. All these systems had strengths and weaknesses.

People had always aspired to more than the traditional system of law could offer. Billy was right: the law was an ass. And a big reason was, legislators are forced by the nature of codified rules to try to anticipate every situation that can arise in human affairs. This is plainly impossible. And, recognizing the imperfectibility of human affairs, the law had to give a big edge to the accused if it was to avoid injustice to the innocent. Both of these things resulted in injustices, even travesties of the law. Couldn't there be a better way? The system of a wise and impartial judge seemed to offer the best option for making the law more nearly just. And, yes, for trying to do something the English legal system did not even attempt: finding the truth, so far as that concept could be said to really exist. In criminal matters, was it possible to attempt a determination of what really happened, as opposed to what the admissible evidence and unreliable and biased eyewitness testimony tended to indicate might have happened?

Well, very little could ever be proved one hundred percent true. But likelihood could be determined to a very high degree of probability, and we had a machine that was very good at just that sort of thing. The Lunar Central Computer.

Oh, my, how the lawyers did howl when it was suggested! The basic proposal had been around for over a century when it was finally agreed, over loud objections from the bar, to give a new system a twenty-year optional tryout. After twenty years submit it to the voters. We were currently fifteen years into the experiment, and still the only planet with a dual legal system. But Luna was being watched intensely by every other planet in the system with an elected government, who all knew a politically popular thing when they saw it.

People liked the new system. It seemed to work better. Officially it was called the Juridical Protocols Test. Professionals in the law usually called it the Judge. The public, after a few years, referred to it as the Court of Common Sense.

This was the system upon whose tender mercies I was throwing myself. Why? Many reasons I needn't explore, and one I can't completely explain. My first visitor, after my initial consultation with Billy Flynn, was Hildy Johnson, and she had this to say: