Keith had ignored his issues for too long. And now, he was paying the piper. First, he’d gotten pulled over for not renewing his license plate tags in time, on his way home from a round of golf. Unfortunately, he’d probably had a few too many beers on the golf course. Keith’s arrest had been embarrassing and expensive, so much so that he might have missed a couple of his drug tests and not paid all his court costs. His builder’s license renewal had then come due, but the renewal form suggested he’d not get a renewal until he cleared up his court problems. So Keith let his license lapse, figuring who’d know? But when he tried to pull a building permit for his next job, the system flagged his expired license. He lost a big contract that he needed to keep things afloat. Keith felt like his house of cards was crashing down. And all for not renewing his license plate tags in time.
Order
Legal affairs matter because they keep order in your life. Think of it: if law is a government-backed guide for what you may do, must do, or must not do, but you’re not following the guides by keeping your legal affairs in order, then you’re inviting the government to change the course of your life. If you don’t keep your legal house in order, someone may soon pull down the house that you’re building out of order. Build your life on a disordered pattern, inconsistent with the cautions, warnings, guides, and commands of law, and your life will have a weak structure, unable to withstand the natural storms and stresses of life. Legal affairs give you the pattern for a sound, stable, and stress-resistant life. Pay attention to your legal affairs, and you should be able to weather the storms of life.
Interests
Think of it another way. You have interests in your life, having to do with your needs, desires, hopes, expectations, and ambitions. You awake in the morning with the expectation of a secure home in which to prepare for your day. You have a strong interest in the security of your home and availability of your property for your use throughout your day. As you head out for school, work, or play, you have a strong interest in moving freely about, without others unduly interfering with your movement. Your interest at school is to learn, while your interest at work is to engage in creative and productive labors in exchange for timely negotiated pay. When you stop at the store to pick up a few things on your way home, your interest is in receiving the advertised goods at their fair price, not fraudulent or poisoned goods at a deceptively manipulated price. When you greet your smiling neighbors back at home at the end of your day, you trust that they haven’t stolen your cat or defamed your character. Every one of us carries a rich collection of reasonable interests throughout our days. Law protects and advances every one of those reasonable interests. Keep your legal affairs in order, and you’ll be free to pursue every one of your reasonable interests.
Goals
A good life generally has larger goals, whether articulated or unarticulated. Your goals generate your interests. You may, for instance, have the goal of living safely and securely. Your interests, then, are in a secure home and safe neighborhood, car, and roadways. You may, for another example, have the goal of earning a good-enough living to provide generously for yourself and your family. Your interests, then, are in a good education, secure job with fair compensation and benefits, and the good health to pursue them. Law enables goals. Individuals living in lawless societies don’t have goals because they would have no expectation of achieving them. That’s the problem for parentless youths left to fend for themselves in impoverished, dangerous, and disordered urban neighborhoods. The absence of law leaves them with no reliable ability to pursue their interests. As soon as they try, someone or something stops them, leaving them better off by not trying. Keeping your legal affairs in order helps you trust in achieving your goals. Disordered legal affairs frustrates not only your discrete interests but also your big goals.
Objectives
Keeping your legal affairs in order has a lot to do with the big things. Order in your legal affairs helps you achieve life goals through the resolute pursuit of your discrete interests. Keeping your legal affairs in order also has a lot to do with achieving those small step-by-step objectives that help you pursue your interests to reach your goals. Life isn’t all about the big things. Life is a lot about the small things, too. You’ve got a lot of ground to cover, step by step, on the way to a good life. An objective isn’t something you necessarily desire to accomplish. Indeed, you’d rather not have to take a lot of those small steps on the way to the life of ease or glory you desire. An objective is instead something you believe you need to accomplish on the way to your goal. No one is going to stop you from pursuing a good life. But someone may defraud you into enrolling in an unaccredited school, illegally deny you a professional license, unlawfully discriminate against you when hiring, or fraudulently sell you a home while concealing the dangerous crack in its foundation. Legal affairs often involve the small things that end up frustrating the big things. We build a good life on the little things. Keep your legal affairs in order to achieve the small objectives that lead you toward accomplishing your big goals.
Rights
So, you’ve seen that legal affairs matter to achieving your life goals by pursuing your interests while accomplishing necessary objectives. Legal affairs also matter in their relationship to rights. A right is an enforceable privilege or opportunity to pursue an interest. Again, you wake in the morning filled with interests that, if you choose to pursue them, will lead or contribute to a good life. Law says that you have the right to pursue lawful interests. Your right means your opportunity to have government backing to ensure that you may pursue your lawful interests. You may or may not choose, for instance, to take a drive to a neighboring state to explore purchasing a business opportunity. But the law would say that you have a right to interstate travel. The law would also say that you have a right to rely on the truthfulness of the information the business seller shares with you. And the law would also that say you have the right to contract for the purchase of the business, to enforce that contract if the seller reneges, and to recover damages in fraud or to rescind your purchase if the seller induces a sale with false information. Rights ensure that we have the opportunity to act in our best interest. Keeping your legal affairs in order ensures that you maintain and may act on your legal rights.
Opportunities
As just suggested, keeping your legal affairs in order also matters to preserving your opportunities. Pursuing a good life involves perceiving and pursuing opportunities. An opportunity is an option or invitation to pursue something of perceived value. You may, for instance, have the opportunity to join a friend for lunch, buy a reliable used vehicle from an acquaintance for an advantageous price, get a scholarship for graduate school, date and propose to or accept a proposal from the love of your life, or apply for an open position at work that would be a nice promotion. Ignoring your legal affairs closes doors to opportunities. Lawbreaking scoundrels don’t have good friends to join for lunch, acquaintances who will sell them a reliable vehicle for an advantageous price, graduate school admissions or scholarship qualifications, a beloved who trusts them enough to propose, or a work record warranting promotion opportunities. Don’t let cracks grow in your facade. Indeed, don’t keep up a facade at all. Instead, keep your legal affairs in order.
Flourishing
Human flourishing is a beautiful thing. We are God’s image, one foot squarely on earth with the other foot stepping toward heaven. No creature has anything approaching the creative capacity of humans. We write, paint, sculpt, design, build, and compose masterpieces. We make societies and nations as worlds in microcosm and then rescue those worlds. We see exquisite beauty, care, wisdom, and compassion in those around us, near and far. Keeping your legal affairs in order allows for your flourishing through your capacity and promotes your flourishing through the capacity of those around you. Keeping your legal affairs in order allows you to reach for the heavens, not just to slog along. If you ever wanted to be someone respectful, maybe even admirable, and to do something good, maybe even special, then keeping your legal affairs in order is a sound first step. Let your legal affairs fall into disorder, and you’ll find pursuing your highest capacity to be far harder. And you may just drag down a few others with you.
Responsibility
Keeping your legal affairs in order indeed has to do with not only your own flourishing but also your responsibility to others to promote or at least respect their opportunity to flourish. Life comes with problems. Many of those problems are of our own making. A few of those problems are not of our own making. Others make problems for us. A good life isn’t just having the freedom to do as we wish. A good life can also involve being responsible for the good life of others. We grow up hoping to be a positive influence on our young friends and a credit to our parents. During our school years, we hope likewise not just to graduate with skill and knowledge, maybe even with honors, but to help our classmates along. When we marry, though, we fully realize the opportunity to make a good life for our spouse, for whom and to whom we give our life, and then in good fortune for our children. We may in maturity also have the opportunity to make a better life for our co-workers or employees, our neighbors, and as a business, school, church, or government leader for our communities. Carrying out responsibilities toward others makes for a better life than living only for oneself. But you can’t serve others effectively when your own legal affairs are disordered. You must get your own house in order before you can help lend order to someone else’s house.
Authority
Keeping your legal affairs in order also matters because of authority. Authority, or the right to exercise power over the affairs of others, is inherent in the world. Parents have authority over children. Teachers have authority over students, while principals have authorities over teachers and superintendents have authority over principals. Employers have authority over employees, while work supervisors have authority over their subordinates. Regulators have authority over businesses, while licensing boards have authority over professionals. Drivers must obey police officers and traffic lights. Courts have authority over parties who invoke their powers. The party who receives a promise within a contract has authority over the party who makes the promise. The landowner has the authority to welcome or eject the visitor. Authority extends beyond human relationships to linguistic and philosophical constructs. The verb takes authority over its object. Truth has authority over the lie. Keeping your legal affairs in order aligns you with authority.
Respect
Keeping your legal affairs in order also matters as a sign of your respect for authority. Respect involves recognizing another’s position, power, and authority not because doing so is convenient or helpful, and not because of fear, but because recognition is due within the relationship. You show your respect for another’s authority when you submit to the authority even when believing the authority to be wrong. That’s the hard part of keeping your legal affairs in order. Sometimes, you’d prefer to take shortcuts, believing that following the law is unnecessary, inefficient, awkward, or unfair. But the law must be generalizable. Law must apply equally to everyone, or it is no longer law but arbitrary and capricious oppression or favor. You can’t make up your own law because everyone else would make up their own law, too. Keeping your legal affairs in order shows that you respect and value civil society and are occasionally willing to give up a little for it, although on the whole you benefit far more from law than the little it may ask you to give up for it. Keep your legal affairs in order. In the bigger picture, doing so matters more than you might realize.
Reflection
What is your picture of a good life? What goals would you want to accomplish to realize a good life? What interests would you want to pursue to promote a good life? What small steps do you need to take to advance toward your big goals? Can you see how having disordered legal affairs could interfere with your goals, interests, and objectives? Do you recognize that you could lose important rights if you don’t keep your legal affairs in order? What opportunities that you’d like to pursue might you lose if you had significant unresolved legal issues? How might major legal problems keep you and your family from flourishing in the manner you desire? Do you know someone or know of someone who has major legal problems? If so, do they appear to you to be responsible or irresponsible? Do they appear to respect authority or flout authority? Are their legal problems affecting them and others associated with them? What legal problems do you see currently undermining civil society?
Key Points
Keeping your legal affairs in order promotes a good life.
Keeping your legal affairs in order helps you pursue your interests.
Keeping your legal affairs in order helps you realize your goals.
Keeping your legal affairs in order helps you accomplish objectives.
Your right to act in your interest depends on having ordered affairs.
Your ability to pursue opportunities depends on ordered affairs.
Keeping your legal affairs in order promotes everyone’s flourishing.
Keeping your legal affairs in order shows your responsibility.
Keeping your legal affairs in order duly recognizes authority.
Keeping your legal affairs in order shows respect for civil society.