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It’s not ridiculous, unless you have something so much better to propose that would put it in that light. For millennia, systems of justice—including the one C

It’s not ridiculous, unless you have something so much better to propose that would put it in that light. For millennia, systems of justice—including the one Chief Justice Roberts heads—have been based in no small part on human judgment rather than ironclad objective rules. In a criminal context this leads to leniency as often as harshness. A purely mechanistic justice system would, I suspect, rapidly be seen to be not worthy of the name.

johngladtj 3y ago
>For millennia, systems of justice—including the one Chief Justice Roberts heads—have been based in no small part on human judgment rather than ironclad objective rules. In a criminal context this leads to leniency as often as harshness. And that's the entire problem. A priori certainty of legal outcomes isn't a problem to be "fixed", it's a basic requirement of any reliable legal system. If purely mechanical solutions lead to bad outcomes, that's a good thing! It means those solutions can be acknowledged as bad and removed or reworked. If instead you arbitrarily make the pain go away because it's convenient you're stuck with a bad solution.
jncfhnb 3y ago
How can you write that a system based on human judgement leads to leniency as often as harshness and call that good? That sounds like the definition of unfair bias.
- brookst 3y ago
  Not the person you’re replying to, but I did not read that as a claim that variance due to judgment is the best possible outcome, just that it is a less bad outcome than the variances and abuses that rigid, mechanistic “justice” produces.
- lupusreal 3y ago
  Because leniency when applying the law is often the most just course of action. Consider for instance a battered spouse who murders their abuser. Murder laws don't have built in leniency for every conceivable mitigating circumstance because it is expected that judges and juries will decide when it's appropriate to be lenient on a case-by-case basis.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    Leniency “as often as harshness” was the claim. Not just leniency.
    - twoodfin 3y ago
      "As often as" in colloquial English doesn't mean "with exactly the same frequency as". Typically it means (and I meant): "with at least the same frequency as". This, by the way, is the kind of non-mechanical, subjective analysis judges and juries are expected to perform all the time.
      - jncfhnb 3y ago
        Ok sure but judges are famously biased so that’s dumb. Suppose it were a voluntary option. What happens when Black people prefer AI judge over the white judge? How often are we really asking about empathy for a situation vs empathy for social privilege?
brookst 3y ago
> A purely mechanistic justice system would, I suspect, rapidly be seen to be not worthy of the name. It would be a parody of the name. Justice depends on context. The world is too complicated for any set of mechanistic rules to cover every possible context. Attempts to remove context from justice end badly at best and are often intentionally abused to leverage the “justice” system as a weapon.
- ExoticPearTree 3y ago
  That's why we have the phrase: the letter and the spirit of the law. Because sometimes the letter of the law is, in certain circumstances, in contradiction with the spirit of the law.

johngladtj 3y ago

>For millennia, systems of justice—including the one Chief Justice Roberts heads—have been based in no small part on human judgment rather than ironclad objective rules. In a criminal context this leads to leniency as often as harshness. And that's the entire problem. A priori certainty of legal outcomes isn't a problem to be "fixed", it's a basic requirement of any reliable legal system. If purely mechanical solutions lead to bad outcomes, that's a good thing! It means those solutions can be acknowledged as bad and removed or reworked. If instead you arbitrarily make the pain go away because it's convenient you're stuck with a bad solution.

jncfhnb 3y ago

How can you write that a system based on human judgement leads to leniency as often as harshness and call that good? That sounds like the definition of unfair bias.

brookst 3y ago
Not the person you’re replying to, but I did not read that as a claim that variance due to judgment is the best possible outcome, just that it is a less bad outcome than the variances and abuses that rigid, mechanistic “justice” produces.
lupusreal 3y ago
Because leniency when applying the law is often the most just course of action. Consider for instance a battered spouse who murders their abuser. Murder laws don't have built in leniency for every conceivable mitigating circumstance because it is expected that judges and juries will decide when it's appropriate to be lenient on a case-by-case basis.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  Leniency “as often as harshness” was the claim. Not just leniency.
  - twoodfin 3y ago
    "As often as" in colloquial English doesn't mean "with exactly the same frequency as". Typically it means (and I meant): "with at least the same frequency as". This, by the way, is the kind of non-mechanical, subjective analysis judges and juries are expected to perform all the time.
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      Ok sure but judges are famously biased so that’s dumb. Suppose it were a voluntary option. What happens when Black people prefer AI judge over the white judge? How often are we really asking about empathy for a situation vs empathy for social privilege?

brookst 3y ago

> A purely mechanistic justice system would, I suspect, rapidly be seen to be not worthy of the name. It would be a parody of the name. Justice depends on context. The world is too complicated for any set of mechanistic rules to cover every possible context. Attempts to remove context from justice end badly at best and are often intentionally abused to leverage the “justice” system as a weapon.

ExoticPearTree 3y ago
That's why we have the phrase: the letter and the spirit of the law. Because sometimes the letter of the law is, in certain circumstances, in contradiction with the spirit of the law.