Judicial systems are many and varied and usually layered, with higher courts dealing with national interests i.e. of the Crown or the State, and lower courts dealing with lesser, local and primarily civil cases.
With lawmaking dating back to well over 3500 years, it is unsurprising that we have such a number and variety of laws and systems, but the methods of adjudicating are far less diverse.
Courts are effectively tribunals with the authority to interpret and administer law, and they operate either an Adversarial or Inquisitional method, or mixtures of both. This applies to civilian courts and also to military and religious systems, albeit, with different names and processes, but the aim is the same: to take written or spoken law, and apply it to a specific situation.
Without going further into the bottomless pit of laws and legal systems, the unpleasant reality is that they all tend to exhibit a universal disregard for either Truth or Justice.
This may seem at odds with their purpose, but it is quite simple. The law itself is deemed to have all the attributes of Truth and Justice, so the courts' only function is to administer those laws, i.e. that justice merely follows due process to ensure that the law is enacted and this is as close as the courts get to determining truth.
Anyone who has completed Jury Service in the UK, may have been struck by the terminology of the court, where a successful defendant is not declared to be 'innocent', but rather to be found 'not guilty', as if their guilt simply could not be proven.
Appeals courts make this abundantly clear, where, no matter how obvious it becomes that a person was wrongly convicted, without new evidence or proof of procedural irregularity an appeal may fail or will not even be heard.
When we say that Justice is blind, we are deluded to think it means that we are all equal under the law, even though this high ideal can be traced back more than 2000 years, because it is realistically more accurate to say that Justice is blind to the Truth. This is particularly true of Western Adversarial systems, where partisan advocates battle each other just to see who comes out on top.
This unwillingness to seek truth is as old as lawmaking itself.
When laws were made by kings or religions they were seen as being written by a higher authority for mere mortals to abide by, so there was no requirement other than than for us to follow the law, and little has changed.
A cynic might say that the only innocent person in a court of law, is the one who believes that Justice will prevail.
With lawmaking dating back to well over 3500 years, it is unsurprising that we have such a number and variety of laws and systems, but the methods of adjudicating are far less diverse.
Courts are effectively tribunals with the authority to interpret and administer law, and they operate either an Adversarial or Inquisitional method, or mixtures of both. This applies to civilian courts and also to military and religious systems, albeit, with different names and processes, but the aim is the same: to take written or spoken law, and apply it to a specific situation.
Without going further into the bottomless pit of laws and legal systems, the unpleasant reality is that they all tend to exhibit a universal disregard for either Truth or Justice.
This may seem at odds with their purpose, but it is quite simple. The law itself is deemed to have all the attributes of Truth and Justice, so the courts' only function is to administer those laws, i.e. that justice merely follows due process to ensure that the law is enacted and this is as close as the courts get to determining truth.
Anyone who has completed Jury Service in the UK, may have been struck by the terminology of the court, where a successful defendant is not declared to be 'innocent', but rather to be found 'not guilty', as if their guilt simply could not be proven.
Appeals courts make this abundantly clear, where, no matter how obvious it becomes that a person was wrongly convicted, without new evidence or proof of procedural irregularity an appeal may fail or will not even be heard.
When we say that Justice is blind, we are deluded to think it means that we are all equal under the law, even though this high ideal can be traced back more than 2000 years, because it is realistically more accurate to say that Justice is blind to the Truth. This is particularly true of Western Adversarial systems, where partisan advocates battle each other just to see who comes out on top.
This unwillingness to seek truth is as old as lawmaking itself.
When laws were made by kings or religions they were seen as being written by a higher authority for mere mortals to abide by, so there was no requirement other than than for us to follow the law, and little has changed.
A cynic might say that the only innocent person in a court of law, is the one who believes that Justice will prevail.
Comments
Post a Comment