When Congressman Anthony Weiner told Luke Russert that “I can’t say with certitude” whether a picture apparently sent from his Twitter account to a young coed was his it recalled Bill Clinton’s famous answer when he was asked whether he ever had sex with Monica Lewinsky.
“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the–if he–if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not–that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement….Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true.”
How can truth be a matter of “it depends”? Well the lawyerly Bill Clinton knew that what Jack Balkin, writing in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy explained. The relationship between reality and the law is not what the layman might expect. “law creates truth — it makes things true as a matter of law,” he writes. So to the question, did Bill Clinton have sex with Monica Lewinsky, well it depends — and it depends on the law. Balkin writes:
So the kerfuffle leads us to matters of great moment. I never really saw with clarity that "law creates truth." Bothers me at a gut level, but there is not alternative unless God comes down and rules us directly.