http://www.independent.org/events/detail.asp?eventID=150
The judge, Kozinski is a typical lawyer/judge, he’s a statist through and through, I actually had to stop listening to his monologue because I found it so disgusting.
I like that David Friedman pwned him in the Q&A. The audience was pretty hostile too.
There is a youtube at the top right of the page that link leads to.
The name of the conference is funny. “Is U.S. Justice Broken?”. Did it ever work?
Nice! Can’t wait to watch this.
Watching those videos was very enjoyable. Friedman was on point and fun to listen to.
Really goes to show that the protection of private property is virtually non-existant in our current world, when state officials can drum up any excuse they want, to confiscate something from you.
“Did it ever work?”
It offers speedier resolution of civil cases and criminal cases than many Third World countries do, so maybe it is relative.
Actually, one thing comes to my mind. Documentary called Paradise Lost. A six year old boy is crucified upside down and his midsection mutilated out. Main suspects are three nihilistic emo teenagers who talk about nothing but death and who express interest in sadism are arrested, put on trial, and sent to jail. There is one problem. There is not a shred of evidence they did it. There is not a witness who said they did it. It was merely plausible that such mentally disturbed teenagers may have been quite likely responsible, but there is no way of demonstrating they actually did it, especially since they were not even in the town when it happened. Still sent to prison by authorities who wanted to appease angry families and get a court case quickly over with, and now it’s likely that three innocent teenagers are in prison for life for something they never did.
It’s not a question of speed. It is a question of whether courts can even provide justice. The more I study law, the more I realize that is not their purpose. At least not the government run courts we have today.
One thing did bother me about this. We’re so far beyond these conversations with regards to radicalism. I think Libertarians are now starting to direct attention away from politics and more towards dispute resolution in a free society, but these discussions about the statist system, and coming up with a quantitative analysis similar to public choice, but for law, completely misses the point if we don’t get radical (root strike) about what the premises of the modern justice system are.
Building upon this, I’d say it’s useful for libertarians to explain to people that, while they may believe the justice system is built on the premise of actually providing justice, what the justice system actually does (today) cannot satisfy the premise. Furthermore, to retain people’s support for it, the justice system must continually masquerade as though it is satisfying the premise – i.e., it must engage in propaganda and disinformation (otherwise known as lying).
LibertyStudent, I am suddenly quite curious about what you have learnt in law that demonstrates that laws are not meant to provide justice. Are there any interesting case laws that come to your mind?
I study corporate law in college myself, and the law is often self-contradictory and just a rudimentary way of getting complicated problems out of the way, but that is a matter of results, not intentions.