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AllGreatProblemsComeFromTheStreetsOrTheLaw 3 - 04 Jun 2012 - Main.MeiqiangCui
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| | Judge Day tells us that justice on the streets is getting what you deserve: “…all great problems come from the streets. Do you know what the definition of justice is on the streets? You get what you deserve (80). Oddly, this definition of justice is her description for the code amongst lawyers: “…a lawyer will get even…that’s how the system retributes itself. It really does. How do they say it on the street? – ‘what you do comes back on you’” (75). This seems to suggest that lawyers are just as unruly, lawless, and disillusioned as those on the streets that must resort to this type of justice to fight for their nearsighted and selfish vision of liberty (“Everyone with a different sense of when the law should protect our liberty. Always…at the expense of someone else’s” (80).)
Presumably the cause of all this is the law, which after all (perhaps even more than politicians), exerts power on people’s minds. It would certainly make sense that it is the law that has made lawyers what they are. Lawyers’ schooling in the law, their dissecting and discerning it, has made them liars, full of double and triple-talk and spin. Lawyers do not know what is real or true anymore because lawyers are not real people: “Real people know what the real truth is!” (73). It is the law itself, as it is currently formulated, that is creating the problem. This is exemplified the battered woman, sentencing case that Judge Day must preside over the next day. Nine years minimum is intuitively wrong given the years of abuse, but that is the law. The law is unintuitive, powerful, and ultimately dehumanizing – because of it no one knows the real truth (certainly not lawyers) and thus no one is a real person. Moreover, in the eyes of the law, people are not people. Like the battered woman’s children, “They’re part of the record” (84). | | | But what is the alternative? From my limited understanding, directly elected judges in US states tend to produce a whole host of problems avoided by unelected judges, including the "tough on crime" trends that have been discussed in numerous places on this Twiki. However, it's hard to know how various factors have contributed to shaping that particular legal environment. perhaps we should be encouraging greater democratic participation and politicization of the judicial branch, or even a reorganization of the current separation of powers between branches.
-- RohanGrey - 03 Apr 2012 | |
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> | It is interesting how people come to different interpretations about the same piece. For me, I think Judge Day feels somewhat powerless about her role as a judge. She said that lawyers are liars, because they double talk, triple talk. Are judges any different? Perhaps they are. But I think the reason is that judges are much more powerful. Lawyers play with the words to try to exert whatever influence on the judges, and meanwhile need to stay in their ethical lines. Judges, within their discretionary power, can make decisions that have a direct impact on the clients and the lawyers’ own lives. However, judges’ discretion is quite limited, so the laws as administered by judges may also far from the truth. For example, in the story about the antitrust case, Judge Day told us how she had to follow the complicated rules to find the facts that may appear obvious to others. The expert on the one hand despised the rules, on the other hand was overwhelmed by them. That explains why lawyers and judges are seen “like someone special”, but also as “an idiot”. They have to follow the rules that seem to be unnecessarily complex or obscure to reach a finding that seem natural to people outside the legal profession. They create the laws to mimick the real world, try to make sense of it by the multiple factor tests, but the world simply does not function that way. For example, there is “no reasonable person”, but only various social, economic, and psychological factors that together influence the community’s notion regarding whether there is negligence.
-- MeiqiangCui - 04 June 2012 |
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