I was thinking about this particular passage in "Encounter at Farpoint" this morning: Considering that we now know what a heavy hand Roddenberry's lawyer Leonard Maizlish was taking in the early days of TNG, I'm kind of surprised that this exchange made it on to the final show, especially since we know that GR was the one who added the Q subplot. Do you think that Dorothy Fontana or David Gerrold may have added that line in, as a bit of wish fulfillment?
I took it as a sort of praising with false damning, that's all. A lot of shows do that, I'm remembering that one lawyer from Jurassic Park who died on the shitter, in that movie. Lawyers have their hands deep in the pockets of celebs, which pisses them off, I'm sure ... but they've made these lawyers indispensable and they've become entrenched, as a result. So, yeah, there might be some mixed feelings, there, but ... not a lot. For the most part it's little more than a busting-on-your buddy kind of an attitude.
It's important to point out that the original Shakespeare character who actually said "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" was a villain ("Dick the Butcher"), and thus the line was never intended to be a good thing to do. Perhaps Maizlish was smart enough to realize this?
I think it was showing us the Picard was intellectual, knowledgeable about history, and able to quote Shakespeare from memory. The show is saying the law breaks down in desperate times. People want the simplicity of just finding the guilty with no complex rules of evidence and procedure with their technicalities and loopholes. In short, they want rule of men instead of rule of law. The idea that people's ideals can fall apart in desperate times is a recurrent theme in Star Trek. It's saying if you build a high-tech utopia, human frailties don't present themselves. But humankind really didn't change, and our human weaknesses are always ready to pop out in troubled times.
"Which led to the rule guilty until proven innocent." Seems to be where society is currently with trial by media.
Wasn't that an example of one of the steps toward tyranny? This line of the show is defending lawyers as a necessity of a free society. When you're angry it's easy to forget the lawyers who get guilty people off are the same ones who will get you off when you are falsely accused of a crime. When you see a case where an obviously guilty person gets off on a technicality, it's easy to put a lot of stock in the emotional heuristics people use to determine guilt, and forget that those emotional heuristics are 'Whichever truth tells the story that most flatters my held opinions is the real one'. If the mob turns against you, and the world really, really thinks you are guilty, thank God there is a selfish, manipulative lawyer somewhere looking to profit off your innocence.