"As a litigant, I should dread a lawsuit beyond almost anything short of sickness and death." -- Judge Learned Hand, Second Circuit Court of Appeals (probably the greatest American judge not to have been made a Supreme Court Justice)
No kidding your experiences with courts have been negative. Even if everything else was perfect, whatever that means, litigation occurs because people have disputes so serious they cannot resolve them without recourse to invoking the power of the state (or anyway, as in medieval Iceland, the community). So they're not happy because of the dispute and they're not happy because they can't resolve it between themselves. And the process of litigation is draining, costly, time-consuming, mysterious, a nightmare even if you win everything you ask for, which is rare. Most lawsuits settle for these reasons, in part.
And everything else is not "perfect." The US justice system is seriously broken, and I would bet its counterparts worldwide are too in more or less similar ways. It favors the wealthy, both in the substantive law and in the process of litigation. It is often arbitrary and unfair. Many judges (and lawyers) are less than competent. Some are crooked. Its defects are manifold and varied.
And yet. And yet. There's a reason that world legal systems have come to seem parallel at a sort of medium distance -- once you get beyond the idea of trial by battle or ordeal, there are a comparatively limited set of broad paths you can take given the requirements of moderately efficient dispute resolution in large and complex societies. You can bulk up process -- what the US legal system has done, or strip in down in the direction of arbitration. You can tilt the field towards professionals, on the continental model, or involve the public, on the common law and particularly the US model with the jury system. One could do a lot to make things better by changing society to increase equality and reduce occasions for dispute. (Leaving crime out of the picture altogether).
The merits of particular changes can be debated (should we have compulsory discovery? A Belgian lawyer friend says they don't in Belgium). Likewise the merits of broad choices like those mentioned above. And of course we might have better substantive law. I surely do hope we could do better. But there's a reason that even post-revolutionary justice systems have tended to revert in many respects to their pre-revolutionary antecedents.
So I guess I'd say not to have too great expectations about what can be done in this area. It's not going to very often than anyone will be able to say, Gee, I had a GREAT experience in that lawsuit, WHAT FUN! (Even most lawyers won't say that.) Or even, more grimly, Justice Was Served. But that isn't a reason not to think about alternative legal systems and reforms, just to be realistic about what they can offer.
--- Chuck <chuck at mutualaid.org> wrote:
> Dennis Claxton wrote:
>
> > The current system is based on a couple of
> millennia of historical
> > development and there has been a great deal of
> attention paid over
> > those hundreds of years to specifics and
> circumstances of individual
> > cases. It won't be easy to create a system as
> good to replace
> > it. The main trouble with our current system is
> that we ask it to
> > take care of social welfare problems it should not
> be dealing with.
>
> The current system doesn't work, irregardless of its
> historical
> "development." It's a system that works for the
> ruling class, not people
> with everyday problems.
>
> Every experience I've ever had with the court system
> has been a negative
> one.
>
> Chuck
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>
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