Why not just ban self representation?
because that’s how they rope the public in.
]]>Ah, interesting. It certainly wasn’t a perfect system, but it was a very interesting read.
]]>The point I was raising about the origins of the court system didn’t actually have to do with the intentions of our founding fathers,
if you mean folks like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or Patrick Henry. It has mainly to do with the development of polycentric customary law in England prior to the Norman invasion and the entrenchment of a strong centralized State under the Norman occupation, and, to a lesser and diminishing extent, the still somewhat polycentric court system that existed up until about the time of the Tudors. The latter was a decentralized order that emerged, over time and without much forethought, from grassroots popular conventions for resolving disputes nonviolently; the aims that it tended to pursue and the results that it tended to effect it can’t easily be traced to any identifiable set of founders, or to their personal intentions for it, because it developed over a long period of time among a lot of different people and a lot of its most important features came about through spontaneous order more than by design.
The resulting system certainly wasn’t angelic, but of course neither were its major competitors (the canon law and the imported state-centric Norman and Roman law), and in any case the specific problem I’m pointing to (the extreme complexity of the law, the need for a specialized caste of lawyers to understand or to work with it, and the insistence on ritualized procedure
at the expense of justice) all specifically have something to do with the history of the capture of courts by the royal State.
Anyway, I agree that what exists now is the most important concern. But understanding where that came from may be important to understanding why it is the way it is, and understanding why it is the way it is may be important to understanding what to do about it. Certainly the problem with the weak sauce reformist efforts that are coming from politically-connected lawyers — mainly fill-in-the-blank forms for things that should hardly be the State’s business in the first place, and maybe lawyer-staffed help desks — reflect a fundamental failure to understand how deep the problem goes.
]]>I agree that the courts (just like anything else in the government) will never reform themselves. As for the original intentions of the court system, I’m not so sure anymore about the angelic intentions we’re all told over and over our founding fathers had. But that point is simply academic anyways – it doesn’t matter what the intentions of those dead guys were, what matters is what exists now and how to deal with it.
Nath –
I believe an agorist court system would be quite an advanced development, which probably wouldn’t happen until the state was finished anyways, because it seems to me that an impartial court system must be open for inspection by anybody, while the whole point of agorism is to conceal economic activity (and producing justice is just as much an economic activity as producing apples).
The current (state approved) alternatives to the court system are, in some ways, worse than the court system itself. With binding arbitration, for example, the arbitrator knows damn well who the customer is (the corporation that hired him) and rules accordingly (the saying “the customer is always right” applies here as well as anywhere).
]]>Isn’t that generally the agorist goal? I’m just wondering what will be needed for people to take the next step of bypassing the court system entirely. There are already alternatives, including arbitration, and out-of-court settlements seem to occur often enough to indicate that people often try to avoid the silly costs of lawyers etc.
Incidentally, I find myself oscillating between thinking the agorist view is a prediction of future social evolution and a less optimistic view that it won’t be very easy for humans to break out of the pattern we are familiar with.
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