What's Gardening Got to Do with the Law?

Mustard Green in Our Fledgling Garden

I've been working a lot in the garden this year. By "a lot," of course, I mean something like "at all," as I've never worked in a garden before. I haven't had one in which to work since childhood, at which time I simply had better things to do, mostly involving my bike or my He-Man action figures.

Anyway, in all honesty I suppose I'm only writing about it here because I don't know what else to write about as I wait for law school to begin, and I'm not sure I have a satisfactory answer to the question of my title. I did, however, just read in a book on gardening some interesting things about water use in Colorado. Turns out it may (or may not) be against the law for me to divert rainwater from my gutters to my garden. According to one interpretation of the law, the rain that falls on my house isn't "mine," it's... the state's, I guess? Another interpretation, though, says it might be OK if I just direct the water right from the gutter to the garden, though it is not OK to collect the rain in a barrel, and then add it to the garden later. There's a little less gray area around using "gray water" (pun unintended), like dishwater, or water from the washing machine -- not that I'm quite green enough to be doing that anyway -- which should be all right. And I'm guessing running a pipeline directly from a reservoir in New Mexico to my backyard is right out.

I can't say I have any particular interest in environmental law as a course of study, but this situation does nicely illustrate what I absolutely love about the law: Every issue requires analysis and interpretation, and the human element is simply never absent. Living in a country run by common law means you can never (at least not for the most important stuff) just consult a book of laws that will tell you yes, that's right, or no, that's wrong. Every situation has its own variables and exigencies, and the solution, as often as not, will depend on two or more parties just fighting it out -- in a civilized manner in a court of law, naturally.

I'm well aware of the drawbacks to this process, but I think our adversarial system is still the best thing going, at least at heart. I don't want a book that lays out the rules and has to be followed to the letter, without regard for the particulars. I want guidelines and smart judges and lawyers with a lot of good, common sense.

Which I guess goes back to gardening after all. No book can tell me what to plant on my particular plot of land or how to care for it. It's up to me to be the smart gardener with common sense. I'm reading plenty of books, believe me, and they're plenty helpful, but I'm not going to find laws in them, just guidelines. I'll do my best to follow them, knowing what I know about the land (which admittedly is almost nil at this point), and see what happens. If the mustard greens don't make it, I'll amend the "laws" next year and hope for better results. It may be a messy system, with a lot of failure, but it's the only one likely to get better and better with each passing year.

OK, maybe this is all a bit of a reach -- or so obvious as to have been better left unsaid -- but I think there's truth in it. We tend to our laws like the flawed, human gardeners that we are, and we hope to see fruit in due time. Impose too much artificial order, and the harvest will be meager and unsatisfactory.

And I'd say the metaphor is now officially overextended.