From: Rishab Aiyer Ghosh <rishab@dxm.org>
Date: Fri, 22 Aug 1997 04:39:52 +0800
To: "'tcmay@got.net>
Subject: an end to "courts" (was RE: An end to "court appointed attorneys" )
Message-ID: <01BCAE9E.55579440@d414.pppdel.vsnl.net.in>
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Tim May wrote:
>It's time to stop this "court appointed attorney" nonsense. If we as a
>nation want to change our legal system to one where the court appoints both
>sides of a case, prosecution and defense, as in many other countries, fine.
>But it's absurd to finance the hiring of defense lawyers.

or courts, for that matter. presumably under cryptoanarchy you won't
have courts - an imposition of authority on people presumed to accept
it - but arbitrators, agreed upon by the two sides. 

unlike in the common-law, jury system, such arbitrators would perhaps 
be able to use their intelligence to figure things out by talking to the opposing
sides directly, instead of requiring lawyers to pick fights in matters of a "law"
so distant from the people it affects that they can't interpret it directly.

however, with courts - and the common-law/jury system, which has _some_ 
benefits over, say, the French or Spanish inquisitorial system of law - you
tend to require lawyers, and i suppose court-appointed attornees are a way
of "making justice blind" as it ought to be. of course, perhaps lawyers should
be avoided by not just the poor defence, but the rich prosecution - the hilariously
entertaining McLibel case in Britain showed that gutsy, if somewhat misguided,
lawyerless people could pull quite a bit over an expensive "dream team", which
McDonalds had.


-Rishab

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