3 ms·

This has always fascinated me. It's very strange to think about the fact that society works this way, and that it has to.

• code_duck 8y ago
  It's the same thing that puzzles some people about the ACLU.
• mlindner 8y ago
  It's called rule of law, not rule of monarch (monarchy) or rule of mob (pure democracy).
• sjwright 8y ago
  It doesn't seem strange at all. It's not the Supreme Court's fault that the defendant or plaintiff in any particular case are scummy or sympathetic, nobodies or famous, weak or powerful. They are aware that their decisions will affect many more people. They need to create law which caters for the for the wrongly accused as much as it does the rightly accused.
  • another-one-off 8y ago
    Everything you said is actually pretty strange. I'm on board with it, but the default what-humans-try-on-the-first-pass approach is to consider each case on its own merits including the people involved (and runs smack-bang into the various -isms, eg, racism). The idea that a scummy and a sympathetic defendant will get the same treatment is genuinely weird and not at all an instinctive approach to justice. This system is under constant pressure to revert back to more primitive approaches, where 'good people' get good outcomes and 'bad people' get bad outcomes. It just happens that, in practice, what we have now is better than that.
    • sjwright 8y ago
      > Everything you said is actually pretty strange. ... The idea that a scummy and a sympathetic defendant will get the same treatment is genuinely weird and not at all an instinctive approach to justice. This is like a topsy-turvy world. The idea that a scummy or sympathetic defendant would not get the same treatment is genuinely weird and not at all an instinctive approach to justice. Equal treatment under the law is justice. The only thing that should distinguish a scummy or sympathetic defendant are the __facts__ in their respective cases. Not the law. By the time a case reaches the Supreme Court, it is never really about the defendant—the facts of a case are almost never in dispute—the question is usually a very narrow disagreement over a particular matter of law.
      • jessaustin 8y ago
        Charitably, this viewpoint misses a great deal of history. Less charitably, it also misses a great deal of what's actually going on right here right now. Poor defendants plea out. Rich defendants don't get charged, because prosecutors know they can afford to go to trial. Of course I'm not saying that poor people are "scummy", whatever that means. No one in this thread has to say it, because the courts say it every day.
        • sjwright 8y ago
          I’m only talking about the Supreme Court.