
Rebooting Justice - noch
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2019/04/rebootingjustice.html
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tacostakohashi
I've had several disputes / legal issues come up in the ordinary course of
business, mainly through ineptitude / incompetence of the other party rather
than actual malice, but unfortunately it is indeed rather impractical to use
the legal system for practical resolution of problems since lawyers are too
expensive, and small claims court / pro se litigation is too time consuming.

Big companies, landlords, employers and the like know this, and often totally
ignore disputes/problems faced by consumers, even if they'd obviously lose if
it ever went to a court.

I think it would be interesting to try some alternative funding mechanisms for
legal services - something like a co-operative with attorneys on staff where
you can refer issues, and members vote on which ones to pursue? Or a lottery
system? Or have any damages awarded go back to the co-operative to fund new
cases?

The general idea would be to find a practical way to fund even a small subset
of cases to set precedents and have large corporates, landlords, employers
behave better towards members of the co-operative.

~~~
virtuous_signal
Perhaps law firms could invite people with smaller cases to cooperate as
follows: everyone contributes some amount of money to a pool and gives the
description of their proposed case. Then the law firm chooses the best action
to pursue using the pooled money. Then if they win, the proceeds are shared by
the firm, and everyone in the pool evenly.

------
ars
Summary: Switch from the current adversarial method (you are expected to find
any and all arguments in your favor), to an inquisitorial system (where the
judge attempts to find out the details of the case by asking questions and
bringing up things you may not have thought of).

The inquisitorial system is already used in small claims court.

The only drawbacks mentioned in the article is a greater potential for
Judicial misconduct.

It seems like a pretty obvious thing to do (perhaps make it optional). Are
there drawbacks I've missed?

~~~
bryan_w
Why not both? This system seems open to having cases won/lost because the
judge didn't ask the right question to expose a fact.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
Many people view basic healthcare as a human right. I think in a modern
democratic society with rule by law, basic legal representation should be a
basic human right as well. One of the biggest source of inequality in justice
is the access to lawyers.

I think the solution is somewhat similar to the universal health care systems
many countries have. The government will pay a certain billable rate to the
lawyer a person goes to. Every lawyer as a condition of their license to
practice law is required to accept these clients.

If we do this, this will eliminate a lot of the inequality that comes from
rich people having access to better lawyers.

~~~
marcus_holmes
the UK used to have this - "legal aid". Some lawyers charged only enough to
have their entire bill covered by legal aid, so effectively providing free-to-
the-user legal assistance. It was dropped by the Thatcher government as too
expensive.

There is a certain type of person that goes to the NHS even when they're well
(or only have a minor ailment), because they're lonely and it's free. There'll
be a certain type of person who will take everyone to court because they're
angry at the world and it's free.

Making it cost _something_ is probably more efficient, but will still exclude
some people at society's margins.

~~~
RcouF1uZ4gsC
>There is a certain type of person that goes to the NHS even when they're well
(or only have a minor ailment), because they're lonely and it's free. There'll
be a certain type of person who will take everyone to court because they're
angry at the world and it's free.

I think there would have to be some type of penalties for bringing obviously
frivolous lawsuits.

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faitswulff
My SO and I were just talking about this:

> Today most people simply can’t afford to use the courts to sue, and if
> accused of a crime they must mostly settle as if guilty, even if they are
> innocent, all because the system is now crazy expensive. (It didn’t use to
> be.) Inquisitorial judges would change that, and give most people meaningful
> access to a legal system to defend themselves.

~~~
ta1234567890
I just defaulted on a lawsuit because the plaintiff did not want to settle,
and going through with litigation would have been prohibitively expensive for
me (which the plaintiff knew). So now I'm awaiting judgement and terrified of
what will happen. The plaintiff is very rich and he doesn't care about the
costs, I'm likely going broke and be ruined.

It is incredibly scary and frustrating dealing with the legal system when you
don't have the money to do it and the other party has a lot of money. In this
sense, there really is no justice, only an unfair legal system that works for
those who have the resources to exploit it.

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EGreg
I had been thinking about this exact problem, to apply all the benefits of
GitHub to the law profession, and to build Agreement.app

I bought the domain name, and recently reserved the app name in the app
stores. But most importantly, I run a tech company which already built the
technology, that lets us produce and launch an app like this within a few
weeks.

This being Hacker Hews, I thought I'd try something cool, to bring capital and
technology together right on the site. I welcome anyone here to contact me
about partnering on it, especially if you work in a law firm. We would start a
new company, jointly owned. Qbix would contribute the base technology to build
it, launch it, as well as the entire initial user base once it’s launched. But
we need to cover the cost of developing and iterating the app.

Here is the full proposal and business plan:
[https://qbix.com/links/agreement](https://qbix.com/links/agreement)

If you're interested, simply email me at greg at the domain qbix.com and we
can set up a Zoom call where I demo to you what we have at the moment.

