Discussion: Legal Reforms

[Comfed]

While it did get pretty much totally eclipsed by the political developments that followed it, I wanted to follow up on the points Cretox brought up in his goodbye post. Aside from just the issues mentioned in that thread there are several other problems that people have brought up:

• It's very long and we can't really expect people, especially new members, to read and digest all of it.
• Compounding the above it is also difficult to navigate, because it is divided into large chapters and things aren't always where you'd think they would be in the first place (ex. territory law being under the chapter that deals with executive branch powers.)
• Viewing the history of any part of it if you don't know what to look for is extremely difficult because there is no annotated version.
• We are over-reliant on case law for many of the concepts that exist in our law. For example, the Court recently invented a whole new plea out of whole cloth in the TNP v. St George case. As a result of this, a culture of litigiousness is easily encouraged and facilitated.
• Arguably we suffer from over-legislation in some areas and some sections of the law can be repealed, simplified, or left up to non-legislative solutions.

Now these problems aren't the only ones people have cited against our current legal system. That's why I'm starting this thread, so that we can discuss the issues anyone would like to bring forward and what the solutions are. I don't have any solutions yet, though I certainly have some ideas that I am mulling over.

Thoughts, all?

 

[Great Bights Mum]

I think it is especially challenging for newer players. Heck, I've been here since the thing started and I have trouble finding stuff. Maybe this is what we need:

 

[Sanctaria]

I do think that there's probably some room for change/improvement. Sometimes discussion gets bogged down in the minutiae of how clauses are numbered, for example - this doesn't seem productive to me.

 

[Attempted Socialism]

As CJ I have been on a slow burn to see what stuff can be done from the court's perspective. One of the major things that can't be done by the court but that I want to bring up here, is the removal of the court (and possibly delegate) from the handling of indictments. We have a Bar Association now, and it is them who will prosecute the case, so why not have them decide whether to take the case or not? And select the prosecutor who handles the case?
Current court practise is to evaluate whether an indictment makes a prima facie case for the charges, but even that means that the Court has to partially pre-judge the case. That creates a risk for bias.
Further, given that most crimes are directly political (abuse of office, subversion of democratic governance, collusion with foreign powers, etc.) the delegate will almost always have an interest in the outcome, and could appoint a prosecutor who will pursue that outcome. We haven't seen that bias come through since the Bar Association was instituted, but there's still a risk in principle.
I bring it up here because the court's early involvement brings in the possibility of bias in a proceeding that should be as unbiased as humanly possible. As we saw in the last case, a reasonable request for recusal can snowball into something bigger. This isn't a silver bullet for that, but I believe it's a step towards a more just court system and less incentive and opportunity for shenanigans.

 

[Comfed]

I don't really think that solves any problems and if anything only adds more bureaucratic red tape. Bias was not the problem with the TNP v. MJ case. The problem was that the defence was able to use our laws to bog down the proceedings and threaten the presiding justice with a vexatious court case. To your ideas about prosecution, no one tried to question Tlomz as the prosecutor, only the justices, and in any case prosecutors in our system have very little power to drop the case and their plea bargains can only be accepted at the Court's discretion. Ultimately, trying to totally eliminate bias from our system is impossible. We are a small community and basically all the people involved with a case, including justices and counsel, will likely be engaged with political issues that wind up in front of the Court and have the chance to form their opinions about it.

 

[Gorundu]

Just throwing it out there without any specific details, but I think the Gross Misconduct crime and how we deal with potential oath violations is something we might want to look at.

I would also say that having a bench of, say, 5-9 appointed Justices would solve the THO circus that we go through from time to time.