"are more important to more and more law students than due process, the presumption of innocence, and all the norms and values at the foundation of what we think of as the rule of law."
this assumes that there was due process, presumption of innocence and a "rule of law" to start with.
truth is, rich people can afford the best lawyer, poor people have to take a 10 years plea deal.
I gave a bit of thought into this and came out with a solution which is called "loto-lawyer" you spin the wheel, and you get what you get as a lawyer. As ridiculous as it may sound, it would be something closer to justice...
The article doesn't assume that at all. Just because a system is unable to live up to its ideals in all (or even most) cases, we should still be concerned if the ideals themselves erode. This is a silly way to downplay the central subject.
This article doesn't offer up compelling evidence that the "ideals themselves" are eroding. It's just a collection of anecdotal examples, showing in some cases it doesn't live up to the ideals, in the author's opinion.
The central subject is people refusing the statu quo of the current justicial system. The article does not assume that indeed, but reference to people that do (lawyers over 50 etc).
I stand behind my comment and loto-lawyer to illustrate how broken the system is until we find a better alternative.
your net worth should not have anything to do with "how much justice you can afford."
Please don't call names in arguments here. It's against the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) because it leads to much worse discussion. Your comment would be fine without that last sentence.
The relevant guideline covers this case clearly and hasn't changed in over a decade:
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
That would break the same guideline in the same way. It isn't necessary to call names—it doesn't add information. It suffices to point out what's wrong with an argument and trust the reader to be smart enough to get it.
A much larger part is the unequal application of the law through prosecutorial and law enforcement discretion. Also, the best lawyer won't mean much if you get an incompetent or biased judge.
Then you have the issue of just being charge will cost a ton of money. Even if you're innocent, you're financially punished. Most summary offenses cost more to hire a lawyer to defend your innocence than to plead guilty and pay the fine. This is by far the biggest farce of justice - being punished as much as a guilty person just to defend your innocence.
> this assumes that there was due process, presumption of innocence and a "rule of law" to start with.
>truth is, rich people can afford the best lawyer, poor people have to take a 10 years plea deal.
Exactly this. The author does a lot of hand-wringing about the loss of the current institutional practices, but never stops to consider that maybe those institutional practices were never as good as they were sold to be anyway.
Justice has never been truly blind, for exactly the reasons you note. In a society that is structurally, historically biased (based on race, wealth, etc.), any institution that pretends that bias doesn't exist will simply allow that bias to be continue. This new generation has seen the flaws in that mentality and has chosen to fix them instead of continuing the problem.
To put it another way: "evil prevails when good men do nothing". The system effectively "does nothing" now by ignoring existing structural bias, and thus allows the existing evils in society - racism, classic, etc. - to affect its outcome. It doesn't matter if the system isn't designed to be "evil", or that the people acting within it don't consider themselves to be evil - The evils in society will persist if they are not actively opposed.
A change in mentality has occurred among the profession (and also as a wider cultural movement) that societal evils need to be actively called out and opposed rather than quietly tolerated. And honestly, I find it hard to disagree.
this assumes that there was due process, presumption of innocence and a "rule of law" to start with.
truth is, rich people can afford the best lawyer, poor people have to take a 10 years plea deal.
I gave a bit of thought into this and came out with a solution which is called "loto-lawyer" you spin the wheel, and you get what you get as a lawyer. As ridiculous as it may sound, it would be something closer to justice...