I found myself at lunch Tuesday with a man who told of being instructed in law school in Fayetteville by none other than Hillary Rodham.
He said she taught him the concepts of malum prohibitum and malum in se.
Those have to do with what is a crime and what isn't.
Ours being a small world, Hillary Rodham, now Clinton, had famously walked free a couple of hours before on the side of what isn't.
Malum prohibitum is the legal premise that an action is illegal on its face simply because we say so by virtue of a statute making the action illegal.
"But, officer, I didn't mean to be speeding," you might say. And the officer would reply that 50 miles per hour in a 30-mile-per-hour zone is ticket-worthy regardless of what you meant.
Malum in se is the premise that an action is a natural crime because of its awfulness, but only by the necessity of proving that the action was taken knowingly and intentionally.
If someone harms you inadvertently or accidentally, they likely will face no criminal charge or at most a minor one. But if you get harmed in the same manner and to the same extent by someone who intended to do that harm to you, then you are the victim of a criminal act.
Your wounds are the same. The difference is solely in the mind of the person causing those wounds.
So it happens that the aforementioned young Arkansas law instructor went on to become the nation's secretary of state. While in that high public office, she kept her emails on a private server. It turns out a few of the thousands of those emails contained classified information.
There is no malum prohibitum statute saying the passage of classified email over a private server, at least to persons authorized to receive such information, is on its face a legal infraction.
So the question becomes whether Clinton intended to divert classified information to a format by which an evil foreign enemy could see it and realize a tactical and strategic advantage and thus cause harm to the United States.
There is no remote suggestion of that. The best explanation for her action is that she was trying to keep her own secrets, not reveal the nation's.
Notably, the FBI director, James Comey, said that Clinton had been "extremely careless."
But then he said the agency could not confirm that any foreign enemy had hacked her account. And there exists no evidence of any harm to the nation resulting from her carelessness.
All of that is to say there simply is no criminal case to be made against Clinton. She didn't intend by her carelessness to cause what appears not to have happened.
As to the matter of Gen. David Petraeus, cited imprecisely by Republicans as comparable to Clinton's: He knowingly divulged to an unauthorized person, his biographer mistress, certain black books containing his own notes on information he knew to be classified. Then he lied to the FBI about it. So he got a misdemeanor conviction and paid a fine, a relatively mild resolution.
If the biographer girlfriend had turned out unbeknownst to him to be a spy for terrorists, and if the terrorists had harmed the nation based on the information he'd divulged, then he'd likely have faced a much more serious charge.
Likewise, if Clinton's carelessness had caused demonstrable harm, the Democrats could well be looking for another presidential nominee. That's because there is one other factor in this equation: Sometimes an unintended act of carelessness can cause such damage that the damage turns the unintended act into a crime.
Let's say I'm driving carelessly and hit a high curb and momentarily lose control of my car. Let's say I then regain control on the roadway without damage to any person or property.
No harm, no foul. I roll happily on down the road.
Let's say you're driving carelessly and hit a high curb and momentarily lose control of your car. Let's say you happen to careen not back to the roadway, but to the sidewalk, where your car hits and kills a pedestrian. There is harm, so there is a foul.
You're likely to face charges for negligent homicide or manslaughter of some increment.
We did the same thing--drive carelessly--but with vastly different consequences.
So Hillary Clinton rolls on down the road.
It's all surely frustrating to those who abhor her. But wanting her to be the driver who kills a pedestrian doesn't make her the driver who kills a pedestrian.
Clinton is not the beneficiary of a rigged system of privilege. She's the beneficiary of two very good things--luck and law, both of which all of us need.
------------v------------
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 07/10/2016