Lawrence Lessig reads Pickett case.
Public performance at
Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue, Harvard University, 1998.

Ambiguity. We, lawyers, don't deal well with ambiguity. Sara is a multiple.ÊWe don't have procedures in court for calling an insider within a multiple. She has an insider who could not consent to sex; a man who had sex with that insider. Did he have sex with someone who could not consent? Can we carve away the other characters? we, law, a regulator, a judge? can we take away these other characters, to say that this one character, this one person, was raped by this one ? this type, this man who stands for all men, this multiple expressed in a single body, this coherent multiple man?

Communities are multiples. They have different insiders. They have children, and adults, and adults who are children. They have people who fish, and fish that are eaten; they have ideals that are pure, yet also the impure. Ideals that don't sing as ideals. They have people who keep quiet. In real space, communities have ways of dealing with these differences. In real space, they use space to deal with these differences. Communities place people and practices into their proper place. They zone one group into an area, and zone away another. Sex shops go here, far from churches andÊschools; schools go there, near neighborhoods with kids; commercial zonesÊget placed near highways; rich zones are on the other side of a track; exclusive zones happen to have one-way street signs that all point the other way.

In real space, a community zones itself into different communities, one community, different places, just as Sara had zoned herself into different people, one person, different insiders. And here the state says, when one zone of Sara is raped, Sara is raped. She is that one zone; the ambiguity, the multiplicity, the uncertainty, the lack of binary, these things are cut away. What is left, the state says, is an insider who could not consent.

And if so, then what of our communities. When a ghetto is raped by a war on drugs, are we? When the quote perverted endquote are moved from main street to the industrial zone, have we all been marginalized? Is our community generally insulted? When we multiply to protect, when we divide to isolate, when we separate to assure that mixing need not go on, is it the pathology that is presumed for Sara?

Ambiguity. Law can't easily digest ambiguity. It can't understand what it cannot easily carve up. Ambi-sexual, multiple, virtual, bi, these ideas confuse us. We lawyers. We with the power of state sanctioned force tied to our words.