Our Antiquated legal system

[Argus]

I rarely agree with Rosalie Abella on anything. But she's dead right on the antiquated, time-wasting, money-wasting legal system we have in Canada. It's a system which profits only lawyers. Every case, be it criminal, tort, family or civil, drags on for months if not years, draining funds along the way. And it hasn't changed in centuries. It is steeped in process, a process which seems to grow longer with each passing year, and it care very little about end results or cost.

In a speech to the American Bar Association called The Causes of Popular Dissatisfaction with the Administration of Justice, Roscoe Pound criticized the civil justice system’s trials for being overly fixated on procedure, overly adversarial, too expensive, too long and too out of date. The year was 1906. And yet, with all these profound changes over the last 114 years in how we travel, live, govern and think, none of which would have been possible without fundamental experimentation and reform, we still conduct civil trials almost exactly the same way as we did in 1906. Any good litigator from 1906 could, with a few hours of coaching, feel perfectly at home in today’s courtrooms. Can we say that about any other profession?

I think if we're going to start reforming the legal system we have to start with eliminating much of that process. That includes much of what lawyers do. We can start, with simple cases, with replacing juries and judges with mediators and justices of the peace. An arrested person on a minor charge should be before a judge or justice of the peace and have their case decided within a few days, not years. And the hearing should take minutes, not days. Family court cases should require mandatory mediation and rarely require actual courtroom time.

[cannuck]

As you are no doubt aware, part of the problem is how long it takes police to investigate and gather evidence.   I could not agree more that there is little reason for ANYTHING in justice to take two years, except, of course for jail terms.  Also you are spot on that the whole system is there to serve the lawyers, police, courts, etc.   I once had a good friend who did undercover criminal work for various agencies, and he told me one time he was having trouble telling the good guys from the bad guys - largely for the very reasons you cite.

[Argus]

43 minutes ago, cannuck said:

As you are no doubt aware, part of the problem is how long it takes police to investigate and gather evidence. 

Yes, but how much of that is to satisfy the extraordinary bureaucracy of the legal system? I read somewhere that a cop making a DUI arrest has 26 forms to fill out in order to satisfy the lawyers. Police investigations often seem excruciating in detail because police are wary of someone's lawyer bringing up something they didn't look into, something of virtually no importance, but which a lawyer might be able to triumphantly use as a sign the police weren't sufficiently careful.

I remember reading an account of a trial once. The lawyers spent days on establishing how a gun worked, for example, and how investigation could determine whether a given bullet was fired from a given gun, and how fingerprints worked, and a lot of other mind-numbing nonsense which the law requires them to do because they cannot presume the jury members understood any of it in advance.