Investing In Lawsuits Beats the Street 203
guga31bb sends word on the next wave of investment in a slow market: bankrolling others' lawsuits. The practice sounds on the face of it indistinguishable from champerty. "Juris typically invests $500,000 to $3 million in a case, Mr. Desser said. He would not identify the company's backers, but said that 'on the portfolio as a whole, our returns are well in excess of 20 percent per year.' He added, 'We're certainly beating the market.'"
Re:Unethical, but not illegal (Score:5, Interesting)
You would expect that ethics would take a big role in how the legal system is formulated, and for the most part you'd be right.
I don't care about ethics. The problem is, the whole system is geared towards requiring lawyers to function. Unclear laws, obscure precedents, etc. Not to mention the special powers the lawyers' associations have, like automatic trust of a member judge.
In order to change this, laws should be written at least as unambiguous as RFC's, for starters.
Re:Unethical, but not illegal (Score:3, Interesting)
The whole point is that this is illegal in most everywhere in the world.
So is the death penalty, but I don't see how something illegal elsewhere makes an iota of difference here.
Re:So what's the big deal? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is your proposed solution simply not to solve the problem?
My proposed solution:
1. abolish legally binding precedent. The accepted interpretation of a law should be a consensus among the legal community, not a decision of one moron 150 years ago.
2. Hire someone competent [faqs.org] to rewrite the laws, aiming for clarity and precision.
3. Law should be treated like software: any and all changes should be incorporated into the text, not distributed as amendments. The current legal system looks like Linux 0.01 with all the patches distributed separately up to 2.6.30, and you can win a case by confusing the judge and your opponent into forgetting a critical patch.
3. Make the up to date text of every law easily accessible and searchable by anyone.
4. If you find there is no law for something new, like, say, the internet, say so. Don't torture existing unrelated laws fo fit the new situation.
5. Arguments should be based on merit, not qualifications and the overuse of jargon.
I'm sure there's more we could do, but these should solve the big problems.
Re:Unethical, but not illegal (Score:5, Interesting)
You can't make laws as clear as technical documents.
Of course you can. Rule #1: Follow the intent, not the letter, And then make the intent as clear as humanly possible.
The difference between an RFC and a law is that you can reasonably expect people to follow the RFC because it is in their own best interest to do so.
Laws are not optional. They're protected by force and imposed on everyone in the area. And they have penalties, too.
The Sophomore Class (Score:3, Interesting)
The trial attorney's primary asset is his experience in court - his ability to win cases.
But that makes it difficult to hit a bank for a loan.
So he - like generations of skilled craftsmen and professionals before him - seeks financing outside the normal banking system.
There is the side issue of collection from the client who isn't paying his bill. Corporate litigation at the highest level tends to more rather more work and expense than the collision at Third and Main.
Gah. Does the phrase "independent contractor" ring a bell with anyone here? Or are you all still living in the Dorm?
Re:So what's the big deal? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is your proposed solution simply not to solve the problem?
My proposed solution:
1. abolish legally binding precedent. The accepted interpretation of a law should be a consensus among the legal community, not a decision of one moron 150 years ago. 2. Hire someone competent [faqs.org] to rewrite the laws, aiming for clarity and precision. 3. Law should be treated like software: any and all changes should be incorporated into the text, not distributed as amendments. The current legal system looks like Linux 0.01 with all the patches distributed separately up to 2.6.30, and you can win a case by confusing the judge and your opponent into forgetting a critical patch. 3. Make the up to date text of every law easily accessible and searchable by anyone. 4. If you find there is no law for something new, like, say, the internet, say so. Don't torture existing unrelated laws fo fit the new situation. 5. Arguments should be based on merit, not qualifications and the overuse of jargon.
I'm sure there's more we could do, but these should solve the big problems.
All your points pretty much described a conversion from the Common Law [wikipedia.org] system as it is practiced in the UK and its former colonies (US, India, Pakistan, Oz etc) to the Civil Law [wikipedia.org] system that has been introduced practically everywhere else and has been used since the times of Hammurabi and the Romans.
However, the problem is that such a conversion cannot happen while there is a large establishment built on it - the judges would have to re-learn, the lawyers would have to re-learn, the legislators would have a gargantuan task of creating a whole corpus of laws without bad loopholes... It would only happen after a revolution. (The German-style civil law was introduced in China, Japan and Korea in the early 20th century, but the power situation were very different from the status quo in the US today...)
Re:Unethical, but not illegal (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course you can. Rule #1: Follow the intent, not the letter, And then make the intent as clear as humanly possible.
What a good idea.
Which is exactly why any half-decent judge interprets according to the spirit of the law.
Where a problem occurs is when the spirit isn't clear but the letter is - and the most obvious interpretation of the letter is pretty bad.
Myself, I think laws should have something akin to the preamble section in the GPL - a short paragraph which explains in clear English exactly what the law hopes (and doesn't hope) to achieve - in order to aid understanding the spirit.
Re:Unethical, but not illegal (Score:3, Interesting)
RFC has some precise definitions that allow such exceptions.
The device MUST implement X.
The device MUST either implement X or fall back gracefully to Y
The device MAY implement X. Presence of implementation of X is recognizable by Y.
The content of field X is undefined and subject for proprietary extensions. If the content is not recognized, the device should ignore it..
Law is a set of inclusive specs: whatever isn't forbidden, is allowed. Thus, if a case is not covered by law, it's no-case.
And border cases are precisely the reason of various injustices. They are a subject of personal interpretation of the judge, so guy X gets away with something harder and guy Y goes to prison for something lighter strictly because they were in the "border" area and their respective judges had some "gut feelings" about whether it is a crime or not. Borders should be defined strictly. If they are not, the law is faulty and needs to be fixed.
Besides, at least _some_ practices should be introduced, definitely.
- unified diffs to changes in laws. (Paragraph 1: "the word 'will' in paragraph 25 line 5 chapter XXIX tome III is to be replaced with the word 'won't'. Goddamnit, the lawmakers should be fired for publishing stuff like this as actual law.)
- one centralized, public, quickly accessible fully cross-referenced searchable source for _all_ laws. Including relevant precedents. With all the back revisions etc, repository style.
- url-like address for any law entry. Finding a referenced line can take half a hour in current style.
- strict list of priorities of laws. A quick and efficient process of resolving internal conflicts in law, without requiring plaintiffs presence. It cannot be that a government organization internal regulations overrides the Constitution.and you must obey unless you sue - you should just notify a proper body about the conflict and they should overturn the regulation within 7 days without your interaction.
- a strict list of keywords of invocation/revocation of privileges. It cannot be that the policeman asks two questions and your answer "yes" to one may be interpreted as waiving your constitutional right about which the second one is.
- FUD is evil. The law enforcement organs should be totally illegal to give false legal advice. Their job is to prevent violation of laws, and by telling the citizens falsehoods about their laws they operate strictly against their purpose. Any offers to the arrested should be considered valid legal contract offers, with equal consequences of failure to uphold it (you can sue a cop for failing to "help you out" in exchange for testimony and require all the punitive damages equal to your jail time)
Re:Unethical, but not illegal (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you heard the expression "your right to swing your fist ends where my face begins"? Well I imagine if that were put into law the process would go something like this:
Legislator 1:I want to ban people hitting other people's faces with their fists.
Legislator 2: What about a light tap with a closed fist as a sort of, "Go get 'em champ!" endearing sort of thing? Do you really think that should be illegal?
Legislator 1: Sure, I buy it. We could put an exemption for that.
Legislator 3: I'm more worried about people hitting other people in the face with things other than fists.
Legislator 1: Like what?
Legislator 3: Well this guy slammed a door on my brother's face and broke his nose.
Legislator 2: Ouch...
Legislator 1: Sure that should be illegal too.
Legislator 2: Wait, what if it wasn't on purpose? What if, like, you were holding a door open for someone and then slipped and slammed the door in their face?
Legislator 1: Well that wouldn't count.
Legislator 3: You would still be responsible for being clumsy.
Legislator 1: Yeah, I guess that makes sense. You should have to at least pay for medical bills or something, but it's not like we're going to lock people up in jail over that.
Legislator 2: What if it's a windy day and the wind blows the door closed and it breaks someone's nose and the guy thinks that it was you slamming the door?
Legislator 1: Well if it was really the wind and not you, then you aren't responsible.
Legislator 3: Wait, how do you prove it was the wind?
Legislator 1: Well... ...And so on and so forth.
The moral of this story is that we don't just throw out old laws because we don't want to go through the trouble of hashing out all of the minutia in them over again. The law is never going to be not complex, because the essential logic that it needs to express is complex.
So long as the concerns that motivated the original law are still essentially valid (which, of course, is not always true), then it's generally better to amend the existing law and build off the work that has already been done, rather than attempt to rewrite them completely.
The law has the difficult task of objectively resolving disputes with subjective elements. When you think about it, that's a problem roughly equivalent to Hard AI. Over many centuries, law has developed heuristics for dealing with this problem. If you take the time to learn about them, you'll find that although they don't produce justice with algorithmic certainty, they do tend to produce reasonable results more often than not.
Re:Unethical, but not illegal (Score:3, Interesting)
All of these examples however differ in just one thing. Intent. Did you intentionally break someone's nose or was it an accident?
The law therefore could simply state: intentionally breaking someone's nose is illegal.
Trying to extend the text of the law to provide a fail-safe method on how to prove intent is futile. It's not possible to establish intent without cooperation from the suspect. The most we can hope for is a good guess. I mean, I could take a swing at someone intending to stop just short of breaking their nose to give them a scare. If I stumble or the target makes a sudden move, you could have dozens of witnesses seeing me break someone's nose seemingly without cause, while it was never actually my intent.
Re:Unethical, but not illegal (Score:3, Interesting)
True, but nobody is legally compelled to listen to a sales pitch or to be involved in an abortion.
Should anyone try in a similar way to not participate in the civil court system, the judge will practically rip the shirt from their back and give it to the plaintiff.
Lack of ethics in sales is harmful to society, but lack of ethics in the legal practice can actually unravel the fabric of society. IMHO, the courts and legislature are being quite careless about that currently.