/law/

How do you think automation will affect the legal industry?

The Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage.

>protip: the ruling was political and they should have found against the plaintiff on the grounds the case was actually argued

It will make research a fuckload easier and will make bad lawyers obsolete.

Only the lower echelon of the profession, the literal paper pushing, but the more nuanced parts will never even be debated. You bet your ass our professional cliques will erect higher barriers to entry (both legal and economic), it's gonna make work easier and lead to higher profits.

They wouldn't be having this problem if not for immigration and the associated conflict between social-deterministic viewpoints and reality.

>There's a difference between banning "fucking sand niggers should all be shot before they can blow us up" and banning "I find the acceptance of islamic extremism in the muslim community worrying".

If you are a legit lawyer then you deserve to be shot and maimed before you die.

There's no distinction, either you believe in free speech for those you despise or you don't believe in it at all.

God I hate the legal profession, bunch of smug liberal cunts, your entire "industry" is parasitical and doesn't produce anything of any real value. Take a productive STEM-related subject or die.

>Take a productive STEM-related subject
I can smell the butthurt.
>doesn't produce anything of any real value
Bridging the information gap hardly lacks value, money speaks.
You're one of those who goes by ancient understanding of merchants being the lowest class.

I'm a lawyer. I will only post if someone pays me $350/hour for posting.

>Bridging the information gap

LOL. Nice marketing-spiel.

The reality is that the sheer size and scale of America's legal profession creates a gigantic misallocation of labor away from productive and useful work. 1.3 million attorneys, if even 1/10th of those were engaged in engineering, entire new industries would spring up in all American states overnight. Industries that create far more jobs on average than the legal profession does, and actually create useful goods that can be exported.

I'm sure when America's trade deficit is even larger than it is now people like you will be smugly claiming that lawyers create things of real value.

Clearly the Japanese and the Chinese don't think so, as they have 1/100th the per capita number of lolyers as America does.

He's right, clearly lawyers are doing things of value or there wouldn't be jobs for them. That said, it's pretty obvious that someone who invents new technologies is more important to civilization than people whose job revolves around making sure rapists don't get deported to Africa or chasing ambulances.

I've always wondered, is the massive amount of lawyers you have in anglo countries a by-product of common law? Seems like the vague judgments it promotes.

Also, it seems like common law is easier to subvert over time by the Jews. For example, Hong Kong SAR and the UK have the same legislation and international treaty signings on refugees as each other, but HKSAR has an approval rate of something like 0.5% for refugee applications, whereas with the UK it's something like 40%.

That shows you the impact of differing interpretation and jewish subversion I guess.

Law is essential to the functioning of each and every aspect of society. People will not be able to benefit from the new inventions if there is nobody to ensure that the civilization actually stays civilized.

The approach of the United Kingdom is much more rights based seeing that the country is part of the European Union meaning that at times human rights are put at a greater value than the literal meaning of the words of the statute.

Good point. You're absolutely right that all those human rights lawyers who make sure foreign criminals have a right of abode in my country are necessary to civilization.

I know this because of all the romanticized lolyer movies that Hollywood has made show it to be so.

To me this seems like a typical lawyer argument. One of the issues I have arguing with lawyers is that understandably they argue with a bias towards the internal logic of the legal system itself. So whenever a really ridiculous seeming (to a layman) judgment appears in the press, the lawyer's defense will be something like "Well yes, that's true, but you have to understand this judgment came about as a result of X and Y pieces of case law that laid down Z test, which the prosecutor didn't satisfy".

The problem with this is that it's myopically focusing on the internal logic of how laws are made within the system in question rather than the broader question of whether or not such laws are just and ethical.

For reference, unalienable human rights are impossible without some sort of Godhead figure in your ethical philosophy, or else you're reduced to absurd arguments like consequentialism.

That and the notion of rights without attendant obligations is just fucking retarded.

Such things are a rarity. Especially in a country with low crime rates
To quote one of my first year professors.
>I know a lot of you want to work in criminal cases. Sorry to disappoint you, most of the time you'll deal with two peasants suing each other over land, and you'll see criminal trials when one of those peasants decides to kill the other over it.

>Especially in a country with low crime rates

It depends what you consider low crime rates. Western countries have crime rates orders of magnitude higher than East Asian ones, even developing East Asian countries like China feel vastly safer than western urban centers. To me that suggests a problem with a criminal justice system that inspires no respect or fear anymore.

Then again, people over here have reconciled themselves to the criminality of having a few niggers stab each other and a few whites every day. That's just normality to them.

frog in boiling water etc.

>at times human rights are put at a greater value than the literal meaning of the words of the statute

Therein lies the rub. The European human rights court is cancer that destroys basic state sovereignty

To me, it suggests a system where people can't move freely or even leave the house without surveillance, but that can't possibly be right, can it?

>To me, it suggests a system where people can't move freely or even leave the house without surveillance

Are you referring to China?

You're completely delusional if so, it's an authoritarian state, yes, but it's not some Stasi-esque country. People shit talk the government all the time online, the distinction the party draws is between shit talking and actively agitating to act against the party itself on a mass scale (protests etc).

And its certainly not true for HK or Tokyo, which is safer than any Western city by a mile and fairly free too.

Lawyers support it though. You have no idea of the hubris of the people you're dealing with. They believe their judgments single handedly uphold civilization itself.

Too much romanticism, as another user said. They've started to believe in their own myth.

Perhaps it has something to do with communitarian values in east Asia?

You'd probably need to compare crime rates over time within the west, and see if there's any parallel with declining harshness of punishments. Still, that's pretty difficult to do given the lack of statistics and the huge amount of potential intervening variables.

>You'd probably need to compare crime rates over time within the west, and see if there's any parallel with declining harshness of punishments. Still, that's pretty difficult to do given the lack of statistics and the huge amount of potential intervening variables.

It's pretty obvious that the law has less of a deterrent effect in western europe than it did, given the end of the death penalty and all.

You can turn around and say "well America has the death penalty and a high murder rate", but America only executes about 20 people a year, and has about 5000 murder cases per annum, meaning that if you kill someone there's a less than 1% chance you'll face the death penalty.

That's a pretty non-existent deterrent imo.

If you doubt the deterrent effect of strict laws, come to Singapore. The strict liability laws against drug trafficking here scare the shit out of people.

Okay - but measuring the effectiveness of deterrence is pretty tricky, you're trying to measure a negative.

I haven't studied crime in western Europe, so I can't speak to that statement - but I know data from Australia hasn't shown a rise in criminality followed abolition of the death penalty.

I doubt the death penalty makes any huge difference to be honest - but like I said, in saying that Australia's crime rate has decreased (at least, violent crimes) since the abolition of the death penalty in the 1960s, I can't possibly rule out economic and other social factors that might have affected that.

Also, Singapore has a huge amount of cultural mores that might affect its crime rate, views on punishment, etc. that don't make it a good point of comparison. In the end, the death penalty is really more a value judgement - its silly to try and argue for it based on its affect on crime rates since it really just comes down to whether you believe people deserve to die for committing certain crimes.

>The problem with this is that it's myopically focusing on the internal logic of how laws are made within the system in question rather than the broader question of whether or not such laws are just and ethical.

What is it, exactly, that you think lawyers and courts should do? Because when you're in a court, you argue according to the court's rules, which is to say, the law. You can argue for the things you mentioned in court, and while they can (and usually do) mitigate any penalty handed down, the court is neither the time nor place to discuss the formation and fundamental (vs. subjective to the case) morality of a law. It's accepted that that's what the legislature is for. If you adopt a principle of judicial activism, aka selectively enforcing or changing laws depending on the whims of the judge and rhetorical ability of whoever is pleading the case, you run the risk of going down a path where your laws are made by the decree of unelected officials based on their individual understandings of what is right, and while that might sound lovely in he cases of things such as gay marriage or [insert social cause you support here], what happens when a judge on the bench has a radically different notion of what is right and ethical and, say, rules that a women who has brought to court for an illegal abortion not only had an illegal abortion, but that she had committed murder and, in fact, ALL women who have abortions are to be charged for murder?

Sometimes the law is ridiculous and I don't want it to be enforced - putting fathers who can't pay child support in jail for contempt of court or whatever else for not following court orders to pay child support, for example, is ridiculous and a modern incarnation of debtor's prisons in my estimation - but there is generally a very good reason why debate over what should constitute law should take place in a parliament and not before a judge.

Agree with the last parts of your post though.

Where do you think this argument leaves the doctrine of precedent?

>You're completely delusional if so, it's an authoritarian state, yes, but it's not some Stasi-esque country.
Yeah, it's not like you need to file internal passports to move or anything! Totally unlike the GDR! (Incidentally, if you count Hukou violations, which are endemic, then China has one of the highest crime rates in the world).

>And its certainly not true for HK or Tokyo, which is safer than any Western city by a mile and fairly free too.
scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1449669/cctv-cameras-run-tens-thousands-across-hong-kong
japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/08/30/national/media-national/tokyos-robotic-eyes-everywhere/

>I haven't studied crime in western Europe, so I can't speak to that statement - but I know data from Australia hasn't shown a rise in criminality followed abolition of the death penalty.

What was the metric they chose to follow? There's an effect that medical technology is having on crime rates, particularly murder rates, that isn't widely known, see:

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1124155/

>Also, Singapore has a huge amount of cultural mores that might affect its crime rate, views on punishment, etc

Chinese certainly do. But Singapore has a large Malay population who are significantly more law-abiding than their cousins across in JB, just a few miles away.

>that don't make it a good point of comparison.

Hah, I love this liberal talking point. It reminds me of the PISA data. When Finland was topping the tables of PISA, it was illustrative of how exams are irrelevant and we all just need to have really easy going school environments. Then when the East Asians started to completely predominate, they weren't a good point of comparison or PISA itself was flawed, or it wasn't proof of anything but being good at exams etc.

It's ironic how unconsciously eurocentric liberals are. If something from the Far East comes along that suggests perhaps liberal democracy isn't the final and ultimate stage of humanity as it exists right now, they get genuinely put off by it and often respond in a hostile way .

>since it really just comes down to whether you believe people deserve to die for committing certain crimes.

It's both. They both deserve to die and it has a deterrent effect.

People like you are the reason Duterte was elected in the PL by the way. Pushing a notion of liberal democratic criminal justice in a country with criminals armed to the teeth in corrugated iron shacks. You have no idea how much damage your ideas did there.

>internal passports to move

Move where? It's only foreigners who need to surrender their passports for train tickets in the PRC. Are you talking about Shanghai right of residence?

>CCTV cameras

London has the same thing and is vastly more crime-ridden.

Nice googling though.

As for precedent, that's generally to ensure consistency of judgement over the years and to keep the law from straying too far from its principles, though precedent is only a general principle and if a court decides that a previous court ruled incorrectly (as in the case of "fighting words" and "yelling fire in a crowded theatre is illegal" ruling, which have been steadily rolled back), they're not obligated to follow precedent provided the precedent is set by a court of equal or lower rank, though I'm sure you already know all this.

It's a good principle to keep around; generally speaking, if you have an entirely novel judgement that cites little to no case law, there's a very, very good chance that either a. the ruling is not a good ruling and will be overturned or overridden later or b. it's a case of judges trying to enact constitutional change, as in the case of recent court decisions in the UK.

>Move where? It's only foreigners who need to surrender their passports for train tickets in the PRC. Are you talking about Shanghai right of residence?
I'm talking about the Hokou system.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou_system

>London has the same thing and is vastly more crime-ridden.
So now London is the whole western world? Also, it does not have the same thing. Your average person in London does not get recorded on 200+ cameras every day the way you do in Tokyo.

I've lived in Singapore. People really do fear the law there in a way they don't in the West. I know this is all anecdotal, but it's something you can't really experience unless you experience it first hand, it's something I really miss. That and the dim view they take of littering.

It makes me sad because westerners will go apeshit over things like not being able to take sociology degree for free but are perfectly content to put up with cities that are basically third world in a lot of parts (See: Paris) and filth and trash on the streets.

Just goes to show that unless there's some virtue signalling opportunity, most people here don't give a fuck about "making a better society".

Slightly later reply on account of character limit here:

To add a bit more on, you're have to consider what a legal system which totally disregards precedent would look like from an ethical point of view, such as in Saudi Arabia. You could have radically different punishments stemming from almost identical cases, in which case it'd be difficult to say whether such a system is fair. There's something to be said for considering each individual case as a blank slate and considering those facts only within the context of the case and not at all considering other, similar cases, but the consistency that arises from precedent (which usually does not address punishment in specific terms but only gives guidelines as to what the punishment or recompense should be and why a crime has been committed and is considered a crime in the context of the law, for example "duty of care" precedent in tort law) outweighs the drawbacks of considering each case a blank slate, in my view.

I'm aware my arguments come dangerously close to cultural relativism at some points - but seriously, a liberal talking point? I never brought up Europe, I was simply saying there's probably factors at play other than harsh punishments in explaining why East Asian countries have lower crime rates. You seem like you just wanted to go off on some tangent about liberals.

I'm not making any moral judgments on your beliefs about the death penalty whatsoever, I was saying arguments for it (or against it, for that matter) that use statistics relating to criminality seem disingenuous to me. I also didn't vote in the Philippine elections, btw.

The Hukou system is a way of rationing public resources - it's smart actually because the urbanization rates in China were so huge that city health systems would have just been overwhelmed otherwise. I don't think you know what you're talking about...

As for CCTV cameras:

independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/how-average-briton-is-caught-on-camera-300-times-a-day-5354728.html

Nice shitposting though. Tokyo and HK are still vastly safer than any western capital and China isn't some sort of North Korean concentration camp.

>I've lived in Singapore. People really do fear the law there in a way they don't in the West. I know this is all anecdotal, but it's something you can't really experience unless you experience it first hand, it's something I really miss. That and the dim view they take of littering.

Used to live in Singapore as well, can confirm.

Lee Kuan Yew really did a bang-up job desu. I'm still fascinated by the question of how rule of law impacts economies and how law helps shape morality.

>The Hukou system is a way of rationing public resources - it's smart actually because the urbanization rates in China were so huge that city health systems would have just been overwhelmed otherwise. I don't think you know what you're talking about...
Pot, meet kettle. It is quite literally an internal passport system, and it is illegal to move from say, the countryside in Sichuan to I don't know, Xucheng, without extensive paperwork and actually getting permission from the government. faculty.washington.edu/kwchan/Chan-migration.pdf
Your statement that it is not "Stasi-esque" is simply bullshit; and yes, I'm aware that the government provides a rationale for the system. Every government provides a rationale for all of its laws, so that's not really a very high bar to jump. The facts remain that

A) It is not a society that permits free mobility from place to place, the way that is simply taken for granted in a Western one.
B) Cheating at the system is endemic and enormous; which if you count that as criminal activity, means that roughly 1 in 4 people in China is daily committing a criminal act. economist.com/news/china/21684145-government-reforms-socially-divisive-system-warily-shifting-barriers

>Nice shitposting though. Tokyo and HK are still vastly safer than any western capital and China isn't some sort of North Korean concentration camp.
I'm curious, have you ever talked to lawyers before? And if so, have they called you out on your blatant goalpost shifting? Because you have very literally made different claims less than an hour ago.

>It is quite literally an internal passport system

No it isn't, lol. It's an internal household registration system. You call its purpose a "rationale", but that is quite literally its purpose: The rationing of public services by limiting people to whatever their hometowns services are, even if they move. It also puts some quotas on the exact limits of urbanization which along with stuff like the chengguan system is partly why even third tier Chinese cities don't look like shitholes such as New Delhi.

>B) Cheating at the system is endemic and enormous; which if you count that as criminal activity, means that roughly 1 in 4 people in China is daily committing a criminal act

I can't speak for that Economist article (has the Economist ever written an article on a Far Eastern country that isn't 'they need to become culturally and socially more western' anyway?) - But I do know that from my time in Shanghai, HK and Singapore, these are all vastly safer cities in terms of violent crime than their western equivalents. Something I'm sure would be happy to confirm.

>blatant goalpost shifting

I hold to my original assertion. I have lived in Shanghai. The PRC is not a stasi-esque country. The GDR simply didn't permit criticism of the government full stop, even in private life. The PRC allows criticism of the government, but it stops when it feels this criticism potentially threatens one party rule (i.e. protests).

That's a very clear difference. It means when you're out with your friends grumbling about such and such bureaucratic system being fucking stupid, you're not going to be reported and thrown in jail.

If you can't understand how this is different then I don't really know what to say to you.

Continue extolling the virtues of human rights I suppose. Eventually your "work" will definitely redress the growing economic gap between ourselves and the Far East, I'm sure of it.

>Cheating at the system is endemic and enormous;

What do you mean by this? Corruption and bribery? I'm from a nominal democracy (Greece) and according to the Transparency Index China are less corrupt than we are, which I can well believe. In fact there isn't much of a correlation between mode of government and corruption ranking on the Transparency International Index at all, if you have a look at it.

Just saying that it's incorrect to assume a system being democratic and "free" makes it less corrupt. In my country the last decent government we actually had from a domestic standpoint was a military dictatorship. So I'm not too sold on the whole "democracy is the best, fuck the rest" idea.

We should have law threads more often

>No it isn't, lol. It's an internal household registration system.
Which is why it's literally illegal to just get up and move from a rural area to an urban area. Or vice versa, if that would be desirable!

>I hold to my original assertion.
Okay, then you're objectively wrong, and you're incredibly stupid.

Original assertion, in post >And its certainly not true for HK or Tokyo, which is safer than any Western city by a mile and fairly free too.
Naperville, Illinois has a murder rate of 0, beating out both Tokyo and Hong Kong by an infinite amount.

>That's a very clear difference. It means when you're out with your friends grumbling about such and such bureaucratic system being fucking stupid, you're not going to be reported and thrown in jail.
When it comes to discussion of crime statistics, it is not a relevant difference; the argument I have been making is that mass surveillance (which is how the comparison to the Stasi comes up) lowers crimes, because no shit sherlock, people don't commit crimes when they're constantly on camera and have their name and address registered with the government so about 20 minutes after being seen on tape mugging someone, the police show up at your home and haul you away. Levels of political repression have absolutely nothing to do with it, you idiot, what does matter is levels of observation, which are and remain extremely high.

>What do you mean by this?
I mean that if you have hundreds of millions of people living in cities illegally, then the system isn't actually functioning at its supposed goal of keeping migration to cities under control. Furthermore, if you're arguing that there is "less crime" in China than there is in any given western state, the fact that you have 8 digit numbers of people illegally living in their residences points to a fucking gigantic crime rate, one so bad that the country has essentially given up trying to enforce it.

>Which is why it's literally illegal to just get up and move from a rural area to an urban area.

No it isn't. Provided you don't exceed the quota for that year, which most people don't and cities are increasingly doing away with anyway (I think Shanghai scrapped theirs a few years ago if I remember correctly), then it isn't.

You seem to think this policy exists for the purposes of some sort of ideological control of the population. Do you understand that it was implemented for the EXPRESS PURPOSE of rationing out public services and discouraging unmanageable urbanization of the sort India has seen?

>Original assertion

My original assertion is the same as it always has been.

>Naperville

Has a population of 75,000 - compared to cities of 20,000,000 plus.

I'm sure Japan and China also have towns of 75,000 with a murder rate of 0.

>the argument I have been making is that mass surveillance (which is how the comparison to the Stasi comes up) lowers crimes

Then why isn't London as safe as Tokyo? And why aren't you calling London a stasi-esque city?

>the fact that you have 8 digit numbers of people illegally living in their residences

Complete bullshit. If this were the case you'd see Chinese shanty towns, since property developers sure as fuck aren't going to risk incurring the wrath of the CCP and risk being summarily liquidated as a company or worse, jailed.

Just accept East Asian countries are safer than Western ones and we'll move on. No need to keep sperging over an unwinnable battle here.

>No it isn't. Provided you don't exceed the quota for that year, which most people don't and cities are increasingly doing away with anyway (I think Shanghai scrapped theirs a few years ago if I remember correctly), then it isn't.

books.google.com/books?id=21_POQoSP4oC&pg=PA117&lpg=PA117&dq=Zanzhu Zheng requirements&source=bl&ots=zHyV2aiEGP&sig=ynoDTN-wbMQhGRlJBoIdNIbMZnA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiviL7NhcjUAhWCGD4KHTcCCpQQ6AEINzAE#v=onepage&q=Zanzhu Zheng requirements&f=false

>You seem to think this policy exists for the purposes of some sort of ideological control of the population.
No, I don't. I don't actually care WHY the policy exists. I'm stating that it DOES exist, and it's existence immediatley places China as a very, very different place than the U.S., where the government can and does monitor stuff as widespread and basic as where everyone lives, and controls movements of populations; this in turn makes it much more difficult to get away with crimes.

>My original assertion is the same as it always has been.
And is wrong.

>Has a population of 75,000 - compared to cities of 20,000,000 plus.
It is a city, (which, by the way, has a population of close to double what you're saying)

>I'm sure Japan and China also have towns of 75,000 with a murder rate of 0.
That is not what you stated. You said that Hong Kong and Tokyo were safer than "Any city in the west".

>Then why isn't London as safe as Tokyo? And why aren't you calling London a stasi-esque city?
I never called Tokyo a Stasi-Esque city; that comment was reserved for China. As for why it's crime rates are higher, I really have no idea, I've not done any sort of comparative study of literally every one of hundreds of factors that go into crime rates, but reducing it to "fear of da LAW" seems pretty stupid.

International law, is it too bloated?
In my opinion yes, and that's my specialty.
While you could argue that regulations are precursors to changes in how international subjects interact, it just feels that legislative activity is rushing ahead and international law as whole is paid a lip service while in practice it's totally ineffective.
I mean, we're still stuck at basic norms, which are often disrespected without any real repercussions.
Should there be a comprehensive reevaluation of international law?
Perhaps changing the scope from ineffective global to more effective regional scope?
Right now it just feels like a pipe dream. Even the most outspoken supporters like USA are running circles around it. Fuck, USA is one of biggest offenders.

>Complete bullshit.
faculty.washington.edu/kwchan/Chan-migration.pdf
You have a funny way of ignoring all data that doesn't fit your preconceptions.

>If this were the case you'd see Chinese shanty towns
You DO see Chinese shanty towns.
chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/03/china-invest-162b-shantytowns/
chinadigitaltimes.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/shantytown-in-China.jpg
google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjS1smGh8jUAhXBPj4KHfLIBtoQjxwIAw&url=http://www.scmp.com/property/hong-kong-china/article/1560728/shanty-town-revamp-not-enough-prop-slowing-china-economy&psig=AFQjCNE4wFpcEStU3dm8zhBVkWu0Pu6_Eg&ust=1497897957133076
cdn2.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/980x551/public/2014/07/27/10f28f8f702ab968e020429ae7683c3a.jpg?itok=xaeL4M8e
gbtimes.com/china/china-steps-funding-shanty-town-renovation
cdn3.gbtimes.com/cdn/farfuture/04MJeR_a_tbmTAZ3cJ8iPYPRPQA-u6YMFa6BpyKMev4/mtime:1407406984/sites/default/files/styles/768_wide/public/2014/08/05/002564ba9eb8135ff71407.jpg?itok=3AS9r5NY
usa.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2013-07/30/content_16849615.htm
usa.chinadaily.com.cn/china/attachement/jpg/site181/20130730/eca86bd9dcd8136154be1c.jpg

How can I accept they're "safer" when we have the latest figure of nongmingong at 154 million? That's about 11% of the entire country committing crime on a daily, regular basis.

Whatever, you've already made up your mind.

To state that illegal residence is the same as the sort of sociopathic violence you see on a daily basis in New York, London, Paris, Detroit, Baltimore et al is just plain dishonest. It's the violent crime that makes western cities unpleasant. This much should have been obvious.

> but reducing it to "fear of da LAW" seems pretty stupid

Yeah, yeah. Deterrence has absolutely no effect. What makes people commit crimes is racism and structural oppression, amirite? That's why American niggers rape and rape and rape, it's because they're oppressed by the man.

>What makes people commit crimes is racism and structural oppression, amirite? That's why American niggers rape and rape and rape, it's because they're oppressed by the man.

I know you're being facetious but that's what people on the left actually believe. It's an outgrowth of the belief that men are naturally good and made bad by society (in this case an environment of racism).

Voltaire was a fag.

A certain extent of human right protection is a necessity, the fact that the European Court of Human Rights as well as the ECJ are pushing the boundaries in order to accommodate current politics makes it problematic.

>Whatever, you've already made up your mind.
Says the man who is literally ignoring evidence that doesn't fit his preconceptions.

>To state that illegal residence is the same as the sort of sociopathic violence you see on a daily basis in New York, London, Paris, Detroit, Baltimore et al is just plain dishonest.
Oh, so now you're admitting that it IS illegal? Because you've just spent several postsclaiming that no such system existed, and that the Chinese didn't have laws against such things. Which is it?

>It's the violent crime that makes western cities unpleasant. This much should have been obvious.
So now that you're (implicitly) admitting that Eastern Asian countries do actually undergo mass surveillance at best and Stasi-esque tactics at worst, let's return to the point. You have lower crimes, not because of different social attitudes because of an abudance of lawyers, but because most people live under a microscope 24/7, which is not how Western Democracies want to work.\

>Yeah, yeah. Deterrence has absolutely no effect.
Could you try actually arguing honestly and not making idiotic strawmen? I never said deterrence had no effect. However, you're a long way from demonstrating that people do not fear the law in western societies and it is THAT and not some other factor that causes lower rates of violent crime (except for where violent crime isn't lower, but we'll ignore those outlying cities that you stated didn't exist)

>What makes people commit crimes is racism and structural oppression, amirite?
No, what makes people commit crimes, generally, is a mix of opportunity and lack of better alternatives; people don't commit crimes thinking "Yeah, I"ll get caught, but I PROBABLY won't be given a lethal injection for it, so it's all good!"

>but because most people live under a microscope 24/7

Again, there is at least as much surveillance in London as there is in Tokyo. So if that's what is driving low crime in Tokyo, then why aren't the same effects being seen in London.

>is a mix of opportunity and lack of better alternatives

How do you explain the rise in sociopathic violent criminality in the west? According to police statistics, violent crime without a pecuniary motivation has been going up for the past 30-40 years.

>Again, there is at least as much surveillance in London as there is in Tokyo. So if that's what is driving low crime in Tokyo, then why aren't the same effects being seen in London.
Can you try not taking shit out of context? Like, for instance, reducing the entirety of continental wide comparisons to numbers of CCTVs in two cities?

>How do you explain the rise in sociopathic violent criminality in the west? According to police statistics, violent crime without a pecuniary motivation has been going up for the past 30-40 years.
[citation needed]

Not enough law fags.

>tfw crim law test in an hour
I'm still 50/50 on the difference between strict and absolute liability, or rather why there is a distinction. Seems like the judges just imply whatever standard they want based on the "social harm" of the offence, which seems pretty arbitrary.

Also, and this is unrelated, but does anyone else find how the media portrays trials these days? It always seems like they're skewed against the defendant, and their coverage of pleaded defences creates a sense that the defences are just slimy tricks rather than genuine legal tests.

I guess I'd ascribe it to the general ignorance of the law (which is why I think some basic legal education should be mandatory in schools).

Agree. I fucking hate how the media covers trials, always have, likely always will.

The Zimmerman case is really just case in point. To this day when you ask someone about the Zimmerman case there's a pretty good chance they're going to say something like "the stand-my-ground doctrine is ridiculous and should never have been law" despite it never being used by the defense.

The media will sensationalise, mislead and lie, then start an outcry when mob justice demands aren't met. They'll mention cases with superficially similar circumstances but different conclusions to try to say how one or the other is unfair.

Most people, I think, really don't understand what 'innocent until proven guilty BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT' means.

I also dislike how no one mentions judicial activism in the media. The Supreme Court decision on gay marriage was 110% a case of bonafide judicial overreach considering the grounds on which the case was actually argued (which was, according to the Justices, the nature and definition of marriage vs. the denial of rights to same-sex couples on the basis of their inability to enter into marriage and have said marriage recognised federally) yet I didn't hear a peep about it when the decision was reported.

I strongly get the impression that very few people really know about the separation of powers beyond what they learned in elementary school and particularly *why* the separation is important to maintain. I wish there was a mandatory course in public law and democratic convention that all high school students had to pass.

>there are people in this thread RIGHT NOW who actually think that trial by jury is better than simply pleading in front of a judge

And you know what they're called? Plebeians. There is no reason whatsoever why trial by jury should be a thing in any relatively uncorrupt state.

>jewish subversion
What?

How are refugee application acceptance rates a legal issue? You said it yourself, they have the same legislation and treaties; doesn't that point to which government bureau is in charge of refugee applications, not the law?

>implying jury trials aren't the absolute last resort in the US criminal justice system

>having your conviction of a serious felony rest on the individual biases and understands of people who don't even have the slightest inkling of an understanding of the law or its principles and most likely only have a high school education

>your fate should be left to some beurocrat with no oversight or input of any kind from anyone else
Jesus. You want fucking DMV employees doling out not guilty verdicts and death penalties as they see fit?
I'm glad your ideas are too retarded to ever be implemented.

They're implemented in Singapore and quite a few other extremely successful, developed cunts around the world :^)

Also,
>he unironically thinks that there is no difference between a DMV employee and a judge
>he doesn't know about civil law
>he doesn't know that a good chunk of cases in the US are bench trials
>but he still wants a gaggle of people who are likely even LESS qualified than DMV employees to decide whether he gets 25 to life rather than someone who knows the law, has practiced the law for decades and whose judgement and professional career have been lauded to the extent that they're made a sitting Judge

WHEW

Law is always supposed to inspire fear and terror. The western liberal law could be established because there were people like Robespierre who did the dirty work people nowadays, living in their safe comfort zone, just wouldn't have the balls to do. Law is part of the state, and the state is a political instrument for one political group to suppress, to exclude, and to exterminate their enemies. These are all important to ensure order and the functioning of the state.

>t. legalist

The problem is that law firm partners start out as associates who are basically just glorified research assistants to the more senior members of the firm.

If you get rid of these roles, where are people going to get the experience to become partners?

Got a problem with that, you Confucian reactionary? Praise Han Feizi, monopolize salt and iron, etc.

>Law is always supposed to inspire fear and terror.
That only works if law covers an extremely small range of behaviors. If crime is basically just murder, assault, theft, and treason, then draconian punishments are fine.

But when there are thousands of crimes covering a wide range of largely innocent behaviors (in terms of being only regulatory offenses with no victim) in addition to the core crimes, then that's a recipe for revolution.

Judicial activism needs to DIE. Judges are meant to interpret the suit and its agreement with the constitution and previous judgements

>approx 1500 years ago
>Pleb comes to The great Philosophers
>All you do is argue all day about things and shapes that aren't practical and you are parasitic in nature
>Do something like shipbuilding or Carpentry

People never change.

Reminder that laws are the way for betas to feel powerful.

Except that the Constitution itself (assuming you're just talking about U.S. law) "invests" and does not create judicial power. Given that judicial power is what created most of criminal law as we think of it, long before legislatures started sticking their fingers into things. Agreement with the Constitution involves law creation.

I have a serious question for /law/ regarding (US) constitutional law. It has to do with expiration times on ratification of certain amendments.

A few of the later amendments (prohibition etc) have a section (often section 2, say) with language which goes like this: "This amendment will be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified bla-de-bla final ratification process by states AFTER congress has approved it and sent it to the states, WITHIN SEVEN YEARS. (this was the commonly chosen time frame)".

Now here's the thing. An amendment can (theoretically) get ratified and consequently become law in a number of different ways, but this is immaterial. What is at issue is /where the above expiration text exists, legally speaking/.

We have several of these amendments now-ratified, with their "must pass under seven years" articles intact, as now-irrelevant after thoughts. Fine, no problem.

But what if such an amendment is not ratified in the approved time frame? On exactly what authority is such an amendment "now inoperative"?!?! /The language contained in the amendment itself is not yet binding law, but theoretical future-law!!!/ (Do NOT reply by appealing to the long interval of time which was required for the ratification of the 27th amendment. Obviously this motivates such above time-frames, but it does not address the paradox that I'm raising).

My point is that any language contained in /an amendment itself/ which is not yet ratified and which is consequently not yet law, which states that that amendment must be abandoned after such-and-such a time, is by virtue of its placement in that proposed law's language itself, null and void and quite unable to effect its own statement.

Because it is not law, as it has been housed in the amendment's language itself.

NOW, if congress wants to make their OWN law OUTSIDE the theoretical text and have it pertain to THAT text in such-and-such a way, okay fine.

I haven't looked into the matter, but I assume if it ever got challenged, it would be taken as a Rules Committee bylaw or whatever they call them.

Help me understand what that is. I assume there's some parallel text that Congress writes up somewhere?

Even so, my point stands. Such language qua-amendment-text is superfluous and paradoxical.

Basically, you have a committee in the House of Representatives which sets up rules for the internal functioning of the House itself. How do they determine which bills to debate when, what you have to do to get an immediate bump of a high priority piece of legislation, how long they're going to spend debating stuff, what amendment processes to bills, if any, etc.

They don't exactly create law, but they create what are essentially the regulations for the House itself, and they're one of the most powerful committees in the House.

I agree, it's probably superfluous to put it in the amendment text itself and not in whatever documentation these guys produce, but in actual practice, they're the ones with the proverbial guillotine for new legislation, and if there was any challenge for what was clear legislative intent, I'm sure SCOTUS would bounce the appropriate verbiage as an extension of their will. (And further assuming that they don't actually have anything explicitly stating that they're ending consideration of a bill or a constitutional amendment after X amount of time)

>How do you think automation will affect the legal industry?

as if judges are not already robots just demanding a high salary

>Take a productive STEM-related subject or die.
Hahahhahaha stemturd undergrads never fail to display their stupidity.

>this is what liberals believe each morning they wake up

>You could have radically different punishments stemming from almost identical cases, in which case it'd be difficult to say whether such a system is fair.

huh? people act on their desire to judge and punish precisely because they do not want fairness for the numerous persons who seem to them as not following their rules

and the ''fairness'' through the punishment constant wrt respect to the breaking of rule X and wrt the geography of the country is poor concept of fairness. What call this fairness? what does it deserve to be called fair? can you not think of fairness through something else? DO you cal this fairness because you heard some guy calling this fairness?

>the dim view they take of littering.
This is for the greater good, which is the task of any society.

That's not at all what I'm talking about. Take the Donoghue vs. Steveson case; let's say a judge takes the original ruling - alright, that's fine. Duty of care is a thing according to that judge and Stevenson is ordered to pay out accordingly. Now let's say another similar case occurs a few months later; a woman is drinking a beer that contains decomposed animal matter or faeces or whatever and becomes severely ill. The judge in that case strongly believes in caveat emptor and states that no recompense will be extracted from the beer manufacturer and that the woman is on her own. You can go further and think up more examples if you like, you get the point. The point is, what I've laid out above is clearly unfair: extremely similar crimes resulting in vastly different punishments. Through case law and precedent, you are far, far less likely to have such a situation come about as you are to respect what earlier judges of equal/greater standing have ruled on the matter as 'stare decisis', or as a settled matter, unless it becomes clear that such a ruling was bad law. To me, and I think to most other people you ask, having similar, proportionate punishment for similar crimes is the definition of fairness when it comes to court rulings.

I fail to see how consistent, similar punishment for similar violations is a poor concept of fairness. It's the very definition of fairness when it comes to legal punishment. And no, that's not what someone else has told me, that's common sense. If you steal a bike and your neighbour steals a bike (assuming you both have clean criminal records and similar motivations) and you are both sentenced to 20 hours of community service and required to purchase a new bike for the victim, would you call that fair? I would. If you stole a bike and your neighbour steals a bike and you are convicted of grand larceny and thrown in jail for four years + fined while your neighbour gets service + a fine, is that fair?

There are no such laws in Europe my ameriki friend.
What a lot of us have tho is laws forbiding racism and sexism, and also denying the nuremberg jugement.

bump

>I wish there was a mandatory course in public law and democratic convention that all high school students had to pass.
Didn't Starship Troopers have a course that every student had to take called "History and Moral Philosophy"? Where the aim was to try and teach students the history and moral ideas that lead to the formation of the Federation?

Hi, mechanical engineer here. While I agree on the legal profession in the US being inflated right now, the same can be said for Engineering. It's very difficult to get a good job even with a distinction - most engineers also work in overseer and drafting positions which do not create more work. You ought to research engineering a bit before you make these assertions

The Security Council is the cancer of international law.

>I mean, we're still stuck at basic norms, which are often disrespected without any real repercussions.
well if your rules are not followed and you dislike it, stop fantasizing of subjugating people to your rules

>that one case

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stambovsky_v._Ackley

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Collins