The de-facto necessities to succeed however, e.g., access to well-organized and consumable cross-referenced case law, the requisite knowledge of courtroom procedure, knowing what to file, by when, and what things mean without significant training or oversight of a retained lawyer; and that's where your issue comes in.
You could make the argument that an infinite number of courts and judges would bring the cost down; but I'm not convinced it would. As you'd still have the exponential case law parsing cost outpacing your availability of lawyers.
There comes a point where stare decisis and it's potential infinitive of cases depending on the craftyness of your lawyer at painting a distinction without a difference, and judges willing to buy it, where the costs seem pretty much guaranteed to spiral out of control.
This is by design in all professions which requires memberships in addition to a degree like lawyers and accountants as compared to engineers.
If banks still did banking on ledger books only the rich will be banked as it was until recent times.
To scale your ability to serve is closly related to cost of service. It is applicable whether it is SaaS or rocket science or legal system
Again, the problem comes in in the fundamentals of velocity of information propagation, of which only half is open to unrestricted scalability. Namely, documents can be propagated at the speed of light. Understanding cannot. You can put every document exactly where I need it as soon as it is accessible, but unless I've had enough immersion in the jargon and specific ways of life of the profession, I'm going to need time to absorb and reckon what to do with it, and where to go next. Even if I do know what to look for, good luck hitting up any database of well cross-referenced case law without paying an exorbitant fee due to the nature of the returns of the profession, and the essentially captive audience to it. Most of those data sources areas fundamental to law as Machinery's Handbook to Machining, yet its locked up behind more imposing barriers to entry than Fort Knox; fiscal, temporal, and cultural.
Short of a periodic collapse and simplification of case law such that the entire field can become more accessible so something less than a Guild/Cartel of highly exclusive barristers, I'm not seeing a fundamental opportunity to change things for the better.
If you're just looking to do one case and be done, the law library may work. If you're in court with any regularity, the rest of the profession has made your decision for you, and it's time to pony up for access to the big boy's toolset.
The social contract I have with society is not I that follow arbitrary rules I don't understand in return for the benefits the society gives me.
A breonna taylor situation would not be legal in any sane society yet it is today, because the people running the judicial system make laws inaccessible and self protecting.
Complicated laws and regulations need enforcement and lawyers . You legalize alcohol, FBI needs weed laws and civil rights to keep their jobs. You legalize weed , they need something else.
Today the DoJ will charge you by the page to get access to legal documents. What else are we paying tax for !!
If it is too complicated for only professionals to understand then needs to be simplified. You are right we need fundamental simplication and radical change .
From the Justinian times codification and simplification of law has always been a mark of good civilizations. Asoka put stone pillars so people can know the law. There are countless examples. If ten commandments needed lawyers it would never have worked .
It will only happen if we doing something about it .
I'm no expert on their system, but there's some regulation of lawyers' fees ('RVG') and also a different system of law - among other things, they do not recognise the concept of precedent, making rulings on statute alone - which means questions of law are much more easily resolved.
Of course, replacing a country's entire justice system would be politically complex in the extreme.
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1641554
I'm glad I live in a country were lawyers still have some professional honor to take on cases that don't pay. But they have to subsidize poor clients with rich ones.
Pro-bono stuff is a great and honorable tradition, but it's not enough. I worry about any system that depends on poor citizens being sympathetic enough to receive free legal representation as a charity from otherwise unaffordably expensive lawyers. It's clearly superior to locking all poor citizens away from legal representation, but it's not anywhere close to sufficient.
That said, a privatized law system could potentially provide greater competition and lower costs overall.
"Customary Law With Private Means of Resolving Disputes and Dispensing Justice: A Description Of a Modern System of Law and Order Without State Coercion"
How it would work in practice would depend upon the specifics of the contracts and the quality of the arbitration. There's potential for both positive and negative outcomes. Ideally competition would create an equilibrium which benefits both parties.
There's a very pessimistic, knee-jerk interpretation I'd like to address. Outcomes are in no way guaranteed to go one way or the other in this hypothetical.
Better protections for workers would allow a larger pool of potential hires. This in turn could create a cost incentive for robust worker protection and liability. Insurers may guarantee the employer or employee by screening for potential misconduct.
This is not to say that it would be a perfect system, but that there is a potential for incentives to work in both directions. With enough scrutiny by brighter minds than my own a workable framework might emerge.
The difference in this case were the criminal charges. Like in most jurisdictions in the world, it would be pretty foolish of someone to represent themselves without being trained in criminal law and court procedure — especially when a failed attempt doesn't mean bankruptcy, but incarceration.
[2] https://www.statecourts.gov.sg/cws/ECT/Pages/An-Overview-of-...
Out of interest, here's a map of judges per capita. It seems the situation in the US is especially bleak among western countries.
https://en.actualitix.com/doc/maps/wld/world-map-professiona...
https://iaals.du.edu/sites/default/files/documents/publicati...
It doesn't generate revenue and takes up huge costs in salaries/pensions/healthcare etc.
Cities and States have finite resources and and therefore come up with formulas of how many courts, judges, cops per 100K they can afford.
Where I live there is like 1 Judge for 300K ppl. And most places its worse. So irrespective of how sophisticated and nuanced the law gets that becomes a bottleneck.
Something for the imaginative HN crowd to attack.