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JakeTaylorSecondEssay 3 - 19 Jan 2020 - Main.EbenMoglen
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It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | >
> | | | | A Reflection on practising Law in the (British) Internet Society | | | The Issue | |
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> | | | | To practise as a lawyer within the British internet society is to operate within a system that is so tied to ceremony that it has failed to homogenize the pervasiveness of technology with the inherent counterbalance criminal courts are tasked with providing to state intrusion.
The increased interconnectedness of the world has led to a level of individual and societal vulnerability that architects and participants in the current British criminal justice system (CJS), do not truly comprehend. The ubiquity of privacy intrusions has led to apathy on a nationwide scale. In the criminal courts there is residual adherence to the ‘traditional’ Rumpolean model of two learned gentlemen braced in an intellectual duel, with the presumption that the truth will somehow materialize at the end. This has led to a level of complacency towards privacy issues, by practitioners (of which I am more guilty than most) as well as at a systemic level, that threatens the very principles on which the system is based. | | | The CJS is based on Blackstone’s ratio that "it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer”.
Religious adherence to this doctrine by practitioners who operate under the ‘cab rank system’ as mouthpieces for hire, results in little attention being paid to the social circumstances and context of each case, beyond seeking to do the best for that client. This means that in the UK privacy issues are not being grappled with. The risk is, in an arcane, outdated system, without consideration of the wider issues, the essential counterbalance played by defence advocates is lost, in that way rights become eroded. This is a defining time, funding issues are a sign of the contempt shown towards traditional counterbalances. As my mentor said to me on my first day in court “do right and fear no one”. | |
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A very good start. At this stage, the coherence in the essay is rhetorical: the tone provides the consistency that the crucial factual material, which is at present rather a jumble, does not. Your concluding paragraph epitomizes this condition: it is rhetorically strong, built to end on "do right and fear no one," which is left ringing in our ears as it should, barely covering the begged question, "what can the legal profession do about all this?"
From a substantive point of view, your argument is that there are two consistent foci of 21st century prosecution: the cameras and the phone. You explain why the law of criminal procedure puts those materials disproportionately in the hands of the police and the prosecution. You show why both complaining witnesses and defendants are at a disadvantage against the state's overwhelming desire to know. One can hypothesize things you might say about how to alter the system, by giving the defense a form of access to the cameras and the phones that at least somewhat rebalances power, but you do not say so.
There is another underlying point, suggested but not touched on: our constitutional understandings about civil liberties have resulted from the historically weak condition of the executive organs in England, compared to the larger and more efficient Continental despotisms. For centuries, that policelessness underlay the English-speakers' unique balance in the direction of individual rights. (This topic is more extensively explored in the spring course, so if you decide to take yourself of the waiting list there and sign up for a seat we can work on it together.) | | | | |
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You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. |
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