ABSTRACT
The intention of this book is to persuade the reader to reconsider what is usually taken for granted and to question common sense assumptions about the law. There is an apocryphal story which well illustrates the central theme. A very new and very small sovereign state was admitted as a member of the United Nations in the 1970s. Within the United Nations, the formal position is that each sovereign state is equal and has one vote in the United Nations General Assembly, even though, beneath that technical equality, the usual hierarchy exists with the richest and most powerful states exerting the most influence. The newly appointed representative from the newly independent state did not initially grasp that the equality was supposed only to be formal. Consequently, he (or she) spoke at length on every topic which fell for debate to the obvious chagrin of the representatives of larger and greater states. At last, in considerable frustration, he was taken into the office of a delegate of one of the great states, upon the wall of which hung a large map of the world. The ‘Important Delegate’ explained to the unimportant new representative his position by showing the vast area of the map covered by such states as the US, Canada, Ghana, and even New Zealand, when compared with the tiny dots which represented the new delegate’s country. The new delegate’s immediate response was to ask a question – ‘Who drew that map?’.
