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There's a line in there that really stands out to me: >McDonald's spent several million pounds, while Steel and Morris spent £30,000; this disparity in funds m
by hjb 6y ago
There's a line in there that really stands out to me:
>McDonald's spent several million pounds, while Steel and Morris spent £30,000; this disparity in funds meant Steel and Morris were not able to call all the witnesses they wanted, especially witnesses from South America who were intended to support their claims about McDonald's activities in that continent's rainforests.
It's pretty galling that the justice system, which is a public tool, being gamed in this way by a party with vastly greater assets. It's a bit tricky to see exactly how to fix this, since you don't really want to just give each side a court-appointed lawyer: you really should get to pick your own lawyer. But what to do about the fact that you might want to pick an expensive lawyer?
It seems to me that one compromise would be to recognize that you can legitimately have a strong interest in the case having a just outcome, and thus want to spend more money fighting it, while at the same time not allowing one side to outspend the other.
One way to achieve this would be requiring that each side can only pay into a common pool of money, which is then split equally between the defence and prosecution.
The practical difficulty in implementing this is that a large company (e.g. McDonalds) will have in-house counsel who are not just hired for solely this case, and it would be hard to dis-entangle just how much of their salary should be counted as being for this particular case.
- neaden 6y ago"It's a bit tricky to see exactly how to fix this, since you don't really want to just give each side a court-appointed lawyer: you really should get to pick your own lawyer." I don't know the details of it, but in England while you can pick your solicitor (the person you meet with out of court, who does research, puts together briefs, etc), you do not get to choose your Barrister (the person who represents you in court and argues before the judge. While this has changed to allow for some selection in the past few decades I believe you still don't have full choice.
- hjb 6y agoThis page seems to suggest that's mostly because the solicitor will have barristers they prefer to work with: https://www.barstandardsboard.org.uk/for-the-public/finding-and-using-a-barrister/how-to-choose-and-find-a-barrister.html https://www.barstandardsboard.org.uk/for-the-public/finding-...
- sometw 6y agoWhile on one hand I wish that they would have been better funded, the huge asymmetry in funding was a big reason they won their appeal, at least.
- grecy 6y ago> it's a bit tricky to see exactly how to fix this Put a hard limit on the amount of money that is allowed to be spent, and that limit is based on how much the less wealthy can spend. If the more wealthy wants to spend more, they can give money to the other side so they can spend equally huge amounts.
- csours 6y agoYour honor we only spent $30,000 on the case, that other $100,000,000 was spent on marketing.
- Hickfang 6y ago@grecy: “Put a hard limit on the amount of money that is allowed to be spent, and that limit is based on how much the less wealthy can spend.” “If the more wealthy wants to spend more, they can give money to the other side so they can spend equally huge amounts.” What was wrong with this comment?
- valuearb 6y agoWhat specific testimony could South American witnesses have given about McDonalds activities in the rainforest? It seems like a pretty big reach.
- vijayr02 6y agoCheck out the Bogolia section (number V) in https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/30/legal-systems-very-different-from-ours-because-i-just-made-them-up/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/30/legal-systems-very-dif...