My experience is that some advocates are much better than most advocates. The best lawyer I've had was a trainee barrister, standing in for a run-of-the-mill high-street solicitor, who couldn't show up. Presumably because she was a trainee, she did a really meticulous job for me, on what was a trivial offence: speeding. Few lawyers would put much effort into a speeding ticket.
She got me off; I was speeding, but I had been charged under the wrong section of the Road Traffic Act. "I humbly submit, your honour, that it would be quite wrong, your honour, for my client to be convicted of an offence he didn't commit, your honour".
But it does answer the OPs question, some are better at navigating it.
I mean of course we don't want people to be convicted of things they didn't do, but how is it ok for someone to get away with something they did do, just because some bureaucrat picked the wrong law?
In fact my "judge" was a panel of lay magistrates. They must consult the Clerk of the Court (a trained lawyer) if they have any doubt about their decisions.
I like this system; I'm not keen on the idea of a judge being able to change the charges on me at trial. I think the prosecution were given the opportunity to go away and get the charge altered; but they gave up (it was 30 years ago, memory falters).
Look, I deserved to be penalised; I would have simply put my hands up, but I had to go to court to make a mitigation plea, because I risked losing my licence.
My point was just that a really good advocate is head-and-shoulders above the crowd.
We shatter the powers to bring and adjudicate charges. This creates inefficiencies, like this. But it also brings stability. (More practically, the judge may not have all the facts and circumstances relevant for citing the person.)
The copper that was standing duty as the prosecutor wasn't briefed. He had an afternoon's-worth of cases to present, and he wasn't qualified to argue a case. And either I couldn't be re-charged because double-jeopardy, or it just wasn't worth the effort.
Just as icing on the cake, my advocate was a stunningly beautiful redhead.
relevance?
Yeah, that's a political decision; the government is so anti-public service that it's cut it to disastrous levels.
In many cases the cuts to legal aid are politically targeted at situations where the government was losing too many cases.
It's obviously specific to the UK, but lots of the broader points are applicable anywhere (especially in the US, where the provisions whose loss he's writing about are provisions people have simply never had).
Arguably the most painful, cringe-inducing part is this one:
> The restrictions on legal aid are already leading to an increase in the number of people representing themselves in courts and tribunals. This has caused the Bar Council to publish A Guide to Representing Yourself in Court. It opens unpromisingly:
>> The law can be very complicated. This guide explains things as clearly and as briefly as possible, but will only give you an overview of what you need to do if you have a civil law legal problem. This means we have had to miss bits out – bits that are likely to affect what the law would say about your own situation. So please do not rely on any of the examples used in this guide.
> A civil case, let’s say something complex to do with a tenancy agreement, may well take twice as long in court with a self-represented litigant. The savings on lawyers’ already modest legal aid fees hardly count for much when the cost of running a single courtroom at the Old Bailey is estimated at £10,000 a day. [...] The conclusion must be that this legislation has nothing to do with saving money.
Courts are extremely costly and/or low throughput. The vast majority of legal resolutions happen outside of courts, whether or not they even touch a court along the way.
It just is not designed for efficiency. Court systems are designed to embody legal ideals (and imo myths) of justice, that may be pretty far from common sense ideals.
We basically can't have a decent court system unless appealing to it is extremely rare. This is the nature of the legal system, not a consequence of details like funding.
This is a defeatist attitude, and one that allows bad actors to thrive. Landlord-Tenant law is a particularly relevant example here because most jurisdictions have substantial regulations that put substantial obligations and limitations on landlords -- far more than most other areas of contract law. However, many landlords can ignore these regulations because their tenants don't have access to courts to enforce them.
I would also argue that family law is an area that is a counter-example to your statement. In cases of divorce, especially with children involved, the courts are almost always involved, even when the parties come to an amicable separation agreement. You'll also note that the processes, personnel, and facilities of family court tend to be a lot more economical than a prototypical court of general jurisdiction. They stand as an example that if we want to make access to courts more widely available and economical, we can.
And as it turns out five minutes in front of a judge can easily handle: “The speed camera is showing a picture of a pickup truck, I drive an SUV.”
It’s only a minute fraction of cases that take significant time to resolve. The UK has ~700 homicide victims per year and significantly fewer murder trials. Individual trials can be long and expensive without it actually adding up to a significant expense.
Anyway here’s Criminal court statistics up to 2019 that’s showing real downwards trends. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
I got one of these in a job interview situation and it really was pages upon pages. I was in the lobby waiting for a job interview, and the person sent to fetch me was visibly pissed off I took the time to at least skim what the heck was in this agreement.
I mean what a messed up context. Obviously I won't get the interview unless I agree, and there's zero chance of negotiating any of these points. Should I just wave past it to placate the interviewers impatience? If I take my time to go through the details will they read me as a potential problem employee that will be legalistic about ordinary matters? If I don't take my time am I signaling that I'm a lax coworker that doesn't apply due diligence? If the interview goes well should I use the same behavior when evaluating the employment agreement? When signing the initial "get past the lobby" contract did I end up agreeing to something that could have implications for me later working at this location?
The whole thing is a kafkaesque farce.
I applaud Stevens for his stunt, even if only ultimately a symbolic protest.
It feels like reform in this area requires a generation of lawyers that become the top judges that are willing to oppose the mentality of most lawyers.
I think incredibly long EULAs would be fine if violation on technicalities were lighter, and/or critical sections were put on top, in plain language.
For instance, I wouldn't care much about Youtube's terms and services outside of what would warrant an account ban, and what's the privacy boundaries. If Google had a clause to change my name to a random "white_dove_mud_pond-24523424" like string every time I include excrement related words in a comment, I probably wouldn't care much, they can hide it where they want. If instead it was a banning offense, I'd want it in the first 10 lines in big red bold letters. Failure to make it prominent should be ground for voiding critical clauses.
On the other extreme, I assume people actually sit for 20 min and read 30+ pages of contract verbiage when they're buying a house. IMHO there needs to be a proportionality between the time to spend on checking it and the consequences for not doing so.
A standard library of terms, preferably from the highest (and thus widest covering) level of government, should be the bulk and basis of all widely common contracts.
I shouldn't have to re-read 40+ pages when I renew my dwelling's rental lease for another year; this should not be one more thing that has to be shopped around for. Don't provide an illusion of choice (as if we the people really have one) at the cost of 10s of millions of wasted person hours every year.
Just make the defaults fair for everyone and sane for everyone. Also, while at fixing things, please fix zoning and permits and finances and taxation to incentivize the missing 80 years of insufficient house creation.
That said. Your "10s of millions of wasted person hours" is a twisted way of presenting the data. Reading the contract was 30 minutes. That's 0.00019% of the time I will spend paying my largest monthly expense towards.
Rental however? Almost everyone uses their own crap contracts or some decades old template contract, and usually there is no one involved except the landlord and the renter. And because there is no need for more efficiency, the market can't and won't push for standard contracts.
> Use these forms to show the terms that must be part of any lease signed in Nova Scotia. The lease a landlord uses may look different, but must contain all the items shown here. If any of the items are not part of the lease a tenant signs, they apply anyway.
This was also at apartment complexes that had multiple units, so maybe it's different if you're renting from an individual for a one-off space.
All basic things of day-to-day life (jobs, rent, utilities, tickets, subscriptions) should be governed by mandated standard contracts (with some flexibility based on a series of optional clauses), so people just have to learn/understand a contract once and take that knowledge for the rest of their life. This way the actual paper contract a person signs should be just a single page, listing the parties, citing the standard contract, and a few bullet points citing the optionals. E.G. "I just rented a house, I signed Standard Rental Contract #3 with a no-pets and no-smoking clauses." - "Good for you, mine is the stricter Standard Rental Contract #2, and they also wanted to add the no-pets clause but I payed extra to remove that."
Anything outside this should only be considered a legal contract if each party involved had their own layer present when the contract was written and when it was signed (layer co-signing it with a legal duty to the client), having full input in writing the actual contract. If a company handles you one of their own contracts and asks you to sign without allowing you to change it, then it should not be valid/legal binding.
That’s what I had on every appartment I rented. As you say it wouldn’t make sense to go through the building’s description every single year when nothing has changed.
Otherwise, an issue with having “standard” clauses, and only the differential in your contract, is your knowledge of the referenced standard at the time of the contract.
Imagine buying a house: I can’t imagine you’d be reviewing the standard house buying contracts every year just to be ready in case you buy one. So I’d assume you’d be reading the whole terms, from the standard + the differential at least once when you buy your first house. But then, if you sell and buy another one 5 years later, won’t you want to recheck the up to date standard terms, on top of the differential you sign for your specific contract ?
At the end of the day, I feel it would only benefit people who spend their lifes in the field and are aware of the standard terms at any given moments. I’d prefer to optimize for the people who are not familiar, and would have a harder time understand the whole of the contract.
That's to make sure it is classed as a short term tenancy, less than 12 months, even if you live there for a decade.
Full legal tenancy rights don't kick in unless you have a lease longer than 12 months. As a result, I've never heard of anyone being offered such a lease.
Having an "auto-renewing clause" in an existing tenancy would defeat that benefit to the landlord. You'd better read the terms on the new lease each time, just in case something changed. But you can use your choice of "diff" tool; it's probably the same as the previous time, including typos.
(Commercial (business) leases are the opposite. Commercial landlords often want to offer only long leases (say 5 or more years), because that arrangement gives them strong rights to be paid for the entire term, no matter if the business wants to leave.)
Even professional investors with millions of dollars of investments don’t appear to read or negotiate the documents until it looks like it might matter: https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2022/03/odd-lots-pod...
People just don’t care that much about legal documents until it looks like it will matter. People’s choice of individual contract provisions at most wage earning jobs, health care, rentals, or vacations is basically nil - they mostly don’t care to read it and so the writers of the contracts put in egregious terms.
On themortgagereports, setting aside that the other camp from "the absolutists" is the former HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson, who is like, one man, who could also probably litigate his way out of any serious trouble, it still gets to the conclusion:
> The important point is that there is much that should be read in home closing materials. Whether you should read every word is arguable.
On professional investors, I wouldn't also hold them as the shinning beacon representing what most of us think or do with money, contracts or responsibilities.
I don't get the feeling that most people don't read, just that it's a deeply painful and frustrating experience that some people bail out from. Like tax reports, or homeworks. I still think most people are way too scare to not take the time to check as much as they can, for them these papers could affect the next 30 years of their life.
Also there's whole sections that can be skimmed pretty fast, but it's different to me than "not reading".
In the US it typically is.
This is a problem with the nuance of law, not lawyers. The thing that finally clicked for me was talking with a lawyer at a electronics meetup. He was talking about some aspect of the law, and I realized that lawyers are just hackers. The system that they try to exploit is the law, rather than a computer.
Your money gets you a better hacker. The system is the same for everyone, but the interface is flexible.
Once fine-print is published we could have a review sites (similar to fact checking sites) that could extract the essence from the fine print and point out major points, issues, etc.
Another, solution that would dis-incentivize 'kitchen-sink' contracts would be ability to invalidate whole contract if one of the clauses is found invalid.
The reason we have Courts in many cases is to try and make decisions on grey areas in terms of what has already been decided elsewhere, you can't open-source that because even the judges won't agree.
Single location where people can access fine print and it's revisions (fine print reserving the right to change at any time is such a BS) would make fine print more accessible (you can zoom in, print, etc, and service could monitor for changes and alert you to it.
Argument that one needs a lawyer to understand the contract highlights a problem with contracts. We all could use education and discussion about contract clauses and analyzing contract clauses online would be a perfect forum for that. It would also put pressure on contract writers and companies to make them more reasonable and clear.
Edit: another one https://pribot.org/polisis
I think by far this is the biggest issue with EULAs and fine print: you really have no idea what anything means because it's all been crafted to cover legal concepts for which you have no prior knowledge.
IANAL. Emphatically. I just can't wrap my head around it all. I'm an outsider looking in, from a distance. But it seems important, like something I should know. So I've been reading books. Mostly stuff from the library. But I still don't feel any smarter about this stuff.
That’s where diversity would help a lot. Congress should be more diverse in terms of background. Laws should be made by people with backgrounds in a variety of professions and not just lawyers and businesspeople as it’s in congress right now. It’s no surprise that they crank out laws that appeal to people with their backgrounds.
This isnt a problem startups can, nor should they solve. It requires political will.
Indeed. I really don’t want any tech bro to come and disrupt the legal framework, move fast and break things. It’s probably not the last thing I want, but quite close. I’d rather work under an imperfect legal system than be at the whim of another sociopathic arsehole.
Even if the general intention is to use standard contracts, each company will have its own concerns: "Our ships are cheaper but a little older, we should reduce the amount of liability accordingly", "We use cheaper off-shore staff so we need to add clauses around languages etc." All of these add up to the mess that we end up with in the Ts and Cs.
Yeah, there outta be a law 'bout it
> Then there's the money.
Single payer law is an idea whose time has come.
The answer to a problem cannot be, "Become a subject matter expert in that field."
You don't understand the problem with your small intestine? Become a gastroenterologist. No thanks. Society has to be built on trust to function. Yes, we've allowed for an enormous amount of trust to be eroded in the Western world, but that's over now. We either make the hard choices to rebuild these institutions or we see the long slow miserable collapse of our society.
The reason my family optimizes for law school as a default is that it's not a specialization, it's a baseline way of thinking about and dealing with any business or life situation you find yourself in. Just as "programming" in the general sense is not a speciality and is something I think everyone should be versed in as a logical form to call upon when needed, their view is that thinking as a lawyer is crucial. Whether you ever practice law or not. This is far different from delving into the specifics of some field of law or, in your example, medicine. It's as general a type of logic as you might get from a degree in philosophy; it just happens to be a lot more useful when you need to get things done in the here and now.
My father's command was: Be whatever you want but do it after you're a lawyer. I didn't do that, but then again, I'm the least successful of my brothers.
All I meant by my original comment was that there's a rationale to it: This is not one aspect of medicine. It's applicable to every endeavor in life. Taking the time to become intimately familiar with the ins and outs of the law is roughly the same as learning the CLI for the operating system that your society runs on. Most people are only familiar with the GUI.
And for the person who said no one can afford to go to law school: Many of the best I know went to night school or even studied completely on their own, and passed the bar while they were working other jobs full-time. Just like many of the best coders.
However, I agree with the guy who called it stupid. Not in calling it stupid, but in that it's an answer that creates more questions than it answers.
You could nuance it and take the steelman version, which is that everyone should be generally educated and know a bit about everything, but we all know it's unrealistic. You can't do part of an actuarial degree so that you understand insurance. But you have to buy insurance. You can't flip through a psychology intro so that you can be prepared when you see a therapist. Or read DS&A so that you can hire a programmer. Or read about structures for when you buy a house, or learn to play the piano so you can enjoy music.
You just can't do all these things to a degree where you are covered everywhere.
Now the problem with certain fields is they reach into everyone's lives to a significant degree. Law is one of those, medicine is another, and finance is yet another.
So you can't even narrow it down to "do these things only", because you can't become an expert in multiple broad fields like that. The only realistic answer is to known a tiny bit about a bunch of things, and a lot about one "thing" and then rely on social institutions to make sure you get what you're due when interacting with experts in other fields.
a) be smart enough to get into a very competitive professional school (most people don't have a college degree, which is required, and even objectively bad law schools are somewhat hard to get into),
b) be wealthy enough to pay for it (it costs on average $150k plus opportunity costs),
c) be interested enough in it to actually consider it, and
d) be... stupid enough to actually do it (there are too many lawyers, and less than 1/4 of them say their education was worth it)"
stupid.
> The only realistic answer is to known a tiny bit about a bunch of things, and a lot about one "thing" and then rely on social institutions to make sure you get what you're due when interacting with experts in other fields.
And this is exactly why "just go to law school" is a stupid answer in this context.
In short, if it were that easy then more people would do it since the kind of jobs it unlocks generally pays pretty well (easily above the national average).
Be it small things like robocalls, or bigger things like a broken healthcare system, gun violence, lobbying in politics or things like the housing/opiod crisis — a big part of the US people I talk to have basically given up on any collective way of fixing these issues and just try to shield themselves individually from the consequences and risks. The summed up individual time, nerve and energy spent on this must easily outweigh the time, nerve and energy it would cost to fix these issues collectively.
Sometimes I even have the feeling that some people like hurdles like these because they believe it gives them some kind of "edge" in the competition with others — a bit like in the 30-year-war where at some point people had adapted to the war so much, they didn't want it to end, because they were a little less worse off than their peers — they had forgotten how much better off they could be if there was peace.
Let's take the example that the public prosecutor's office is bound by the instructions of the Ministry of Justice. Let us now assume that someone files charges against two politicians on the (justified) suspicion of supporting tax evasion by banks, and let us assume that these politicians now hold very prominent positions in the country. How would the public prosecutor's office react?
Exactly. The initial suspicion necessary for an investigation is denied. Despite demonstrable false statements made by the politicians in question before parliamentary investigative committees.
There are also regular rulings by the Hamburg court (think Delaware) regarding copyright, addblockers and the like.
Here, too, the individual can do nothing. Because the system is not made to allow such influence of individuals.
The elected representatives have gone through years of party school. Polished smoothly. Streamlined. Who questions things or acts in the sense of the people will find no place on the list to be elected. Who wants to found an own party must do a lot and will fail in the vast majority of cases because you need 5% of the votes to be represented at all in parliament.
Demonstrations, petitions and the like have not changed anything for a long time.
Imho we live in a corporate democracy. Not a democracy that represents any "people".
So the rational thing to do is to stop caring and to "only" protect one's own personal life and that of one's loved ones.
And if/when a family like mine puts themselves through law school - this generation wants to slag it as if that represents privilege or assimilation?
My father was responsible for having hundreds of criminal convictions overturned in one single civil rights case before the supreme court of California. His parents didn't even speak English. I guess he shouldn't have put himself through law school taking on debt and selling shoes?
For examples, imposed barriers for law or medical school is a form of barriers of entry. The profit-seeking motive becomes rent-seeking then, because the number of competitors is artificially lower.
We can't have a functional society like this: by the time i am done getting a law degree, a software degree, a finance degree (massive dark pattern there), medical degree , etc - i will be 60 and millions in debt.
In a functional society you rely on the rest of society to get things roughly correct, and to not defraud you every step.
Adopt the dog-eats-dog view of the world, and you will get basically russia - spciety ruled by fraud and violence, with mafia boss at the helm
Of those things you mentioned, only the law degree is useful when dealing with issues that arise in all of the others.
2. You might have saved the same amount of money by taking your car to more than one mechanic to get an estimate, without having done all that research.
3. "Building wealth is not about refraining from spending money." On the contrary, that's exactly what it's about, algebraically speaking. Income minus expenses is profit, a/k/a wealth.
Now, don't get me wrong - I don't disagree that it's good to know things; I went to university and then law school to get a well-rounded education (I'm an attorney as well as an engineer). But that doesn't mean I spent my time in the most economical way possible. (Law school was very expensive, and I don't even practice law.) If I scrubbed toilets for a living, I'd be way worse off than I am today, even if I knew how to fix my own car.
Congratulations might be the wrong word, but I applaud that you chose to become an attorney and an engineer; that type of combination is the gold standard for my family. I can't believe it's something you'd ever regret.
My argument throughout this thread has been misconstrued. All I'm arguing for is that people should use every available opportunity to educate themselves, and that certain things (to me, logic, computer science, legal, mechanical, biological, historical, and literary - but your preferences may differ) are valuable tools that are worth constantly continuing to educate yourself in.
On refraining from spending money: If you buy things that are worth what you paid for them (as an expendable or an experience), or things that increase in value over time, then spending money is fine. i.e. a fairly agreed-upon trade benefits both parties. The loss of net value comes in with friction in the transaction. Generally, spending money unwisely. If you require an expert go-between for every transaction, those fractions add up to the difference between your income and expenditure. Put more bluntly: The money I save on mechanics because I read the manuals and/or do the work myself is money I save. When I do want to spend money, it's not a problem if I'm getting what I expect from it, because it's an equal trade. The only loss would be if I didn't willingly agree to pay for what I got.
I lucked out in that we had been friends before. I have answered many development and programming questions and issues for them, and they have for me too.
To others commenting, I guess it's about having trust in others and using that. We have friends and family that are in CS, accounting, law, medicine, etc. What we don't have, we pay for. Find a good resource and pay them.
I guess this goes back to the grandparent post were they talk about access and costs of different lawyers.
I'm sure it would make the lives of whoever manages their IT a lot easier if they can just expect the lawyers to go through a few more years of college. You can just blindly deploy updates, assume everybody uses the communicated backup plan and put the full blame on the lawyers if they get hacked because they use a crappy password. Sysadmin heaven!
Form your own country and become a president.
Yet we have lawyers talking through the technical minutiae as if they are source code. There's a huge disconnect between what people understand their rights and legal positions to be, and what the lawyers can turn it into.
There's other problems as well. At least here in the UK, the court system does not have enough capacity. This leads to all sorts of problems with who gets justice.
Then there's the money. If we're all equal before the law, how can there be lawyers who cost thousands an hour? Either they're more effective than other lawyers, in which case we're not all equal under the law, or they're just as good as any other lawyer, in which case they are just good marketers. I'm sure it's a mix of both, but if we cared that everyone had equal access, why wouldn't there simply be a big bench of lawyers from which you get assigned one? The legal system has somehow managed to both be a social good and a tremendous source of profit for its members. (Well, some of its members, they don't all make piles of cash.)