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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, September 26 2012 @ 10:57 AM EDT |
Honest, educated people who are not greedy and people who
are NOT rewarded for bad behaviour.
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- What is left? - Authored by: PJ on Wednesday, September 26 2012 @ 11:16 AM EDT
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, September 26 2012 @ 11:06 AM EDT |
If you still want a jury system steer closer to the British way of doing
things.
Anyway there are many ways to a lay influence on the legal system. Say by
including lay judges in the progress. In Sweden they a called
"nämdemän". I think you can find a good model anywhere in Europe. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Tyro on Wednesday, September 26 2012 @ 12:21 PM EDT |
One thing that would help is if court expenses, including lawyers fees, were
proportional to the wealth of the parties involved. That's not fair either, of
course, and it leads to the sticky problem of what if you aren't satisfied with
your lawyer.
You are right that the system is clearly broken. Any adversarial system will be
broken, though the precise location of the breaks will vary from implementation
to implementation. And non-adversarial systems require placing an unreasonable
amount of trust in a third party. But any system that allows SLAPP suits to not
only exist, but to be profitable to those filing them, and expensive to those
receiving them, is grossly broken.
So I can point out ways that the system is broken, and things that need to be
fixed. I can't tell you how to get from here to there. And I can't conceive of
a system that isn't broken in one way or another. I doubt it's possibility of
existence while being run by humans. (And believe me, you wouldn't want it to
be run by a machine that interpreted the laws literally. That would be even
worse...at least until the laws were re-written, a project that would require
decades at the minimum. Because people don't understand what the sentences say,
but what they think they should mean. And saying "term of art"
doesn't resolve this problem. If anything it makes it worse, because most of
those terms of art don't have any useful precise definition, but depend on
common sense. At least with standard English there's a general agreement on
about what each word means, and what most sentences should mean, even if that
isn't what the sentence says.) If you think I'm exaggerating, try to remember
the first time you tried to write a program, and then remember that THAT program
was being written in a language where every single term had a very precise
definition, and the grammar was very simple and fixed.
It is the nature of human language to be ambiguous. This ONLY gets resolved
when there is a need to translate it into mathematics (including programming)
*AND* there exists a clear way of detecting any errors that may occur. People
depend on other people to "know what I mean", and the language used
reflects this. It also reflects that if you guess wrong about "what I
mean", there's usually no consequence. Sensible interpretations usually
fall within reasonable bounds. But literal interpretations are much different
than are sensible ones.
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| Authored by: tknarr on Wednesday, September 26 2012 @ 01:05 PM EDT |
My thought would be that one way to improve it is to change the selection
process. You bring in a pool. The judge may dismiss a candidate for cause. Each
party has an unlimited number of chances to dismiss a candidate for cause.
Nobody has any ability to dismiss a candidate for anything other than
cause. If you exhaust the pool without having enough candidates left, you call
in another pool. Once you've got enough candidates you throw their names in a
hat, the judge shakes the hat and counsel for the parties alternate drawing
names from the hat until you've got your jury panel and alternates. The parties
are stuck with whatever names come out of the hat.
Another change would
be to give the jury the right, at any point, to ask the judge questions
including asking him to elaborate on a point that's not completely clear. The
judge can tell the jury the answer to that question's not relevant to the case,
however the fact that the parties didn't bring the question up does not
automatically make the answer irrelevant. The reason the jury's not supposed to
evaluate things other than what's presented in court is so there's no evidence
or argument involved that the parties haven't had a chance to address, but
that's not an issue if the question's brought up by the jury and the judge and
the parties have a chance to address it. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- The court did ask. - Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, September 26 2012 @ 02:41 PM EDT
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