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March 10, 2012
Writers Gotta Write: The Return of Simple Justice.
New York criminal defense lawyer Scott Greenfield teased us (me, anyway) at first in a few outings for old times' sake soon after he shut down Simple Justice, his enormously popular blog, on February 13, the day of the site's fifth anniversary. It was hard to say what, if anything, a post-closing post here and there at the old site signaled about the trial lawyer's plans for the future. Don't jump the gun, you told yourself. It might not mean anything but a cooling-off gesture, a victory lap or two around the track for a winning half-decade of quality. But two days ago, in this post, Greenfield made it clear that he was back to his Spartan early morning keyboard regime of reading, thinking, evaluating, reacting, calling-out and inspiring and irritating a remarkably broad spectrum of people in several English-speaking nations. The Return of Greenfield is very good news for a notoriously dodgy and new world neighborhood: The Internet.
Posted by JD Hull at 02:36 PM | Comments (0)
Stanford Law's Amalia Kessler: Adhesion, Arbitration and the American bias against ADR.
Full Ajudication: Expensive but American. For an unusually good explanation of why Americans historically have resisted arbitration and other ADR, see the op-ed piece by Stanford law professor Amalia Kessler entitled "Stuck in Arbitration", which appeared earlier this week in the New York Times. Excerpt:
The standard historical account begins with the Federal Arbitration Act [1925], but the practice of extrajudicial dispute resolution has a much longer history.
Mid-19th century Americans across several territories and states — including Florida, California and New York — engaged in a nearly forgotten debate concerning “conciliation courts.”
Widely adopted throughout Europe and its colonies during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, these were institutions composed of respected community leaders seeking to persuade disputants to accept an equitable compromise in secret, lawyer-free proceedings and without regard to the formal rule of law.
Despite the efforts of American proponents of these courts, proposals to establish them went nowhere.
In the view of their opponents (including businessmen and lawyers), such courts were incompatible with the American commitment to freedom. Adjudication, they successfully insisted, was a vital bulwark of liberty. It enabled individuals to publicly assert their rights as equal citizens under the law.
As one delegate to the 1846 New York State Constitutional Convention argued, “In a free country like this” — one “where every man was the equal of his fellow-man” — “there would always be litigation.”
Posted by JD Hull at 12:28 PM | Comments (0)