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: My day in court
Other than being called for potential jury duty once, I've never been involved with the court system in my life. That changes today, as I will appear in small claims court this evening.
I can't go into details about the case. It involves getting money back from someone, and that's all I can say at the moment.
It's been over a year since the actual incident that lead to this case. If I have learned anything in this, it's that getting justice in a modern liberal society is gratingly slow.
There is something I want from this process, and which I need to remind myself that courts don't provide: moral censure. There's a part of myself that wants the other guy to be strung up and publicly insulted and humiliated.
On a forum last year, I read a guy's post about a similar case: a store wouldn't give him the consignment money he thought he had a right to. He asked what he should do about this. I and others suggested small claims court or other legal recourses, but he kept pushing the point. Eventually I realized what he really wanted was public moral validation; for everyone to say, "You're a good and innocent victim, and those other people are evil bastards. Poor baby! We hate them as much as you do."
The whole point of liberal systems of justice is that social control becomes a matter of fairness and hurt vs. help, not a matter of group loyalty or deference to authority, and especially not a matter of sacredness/profanity. Those older systems of morality and social control still exist, but their influence within the justice system are supposed to be minimized. We don't draw and quarter people in the town square anymore. We don't take a person and make them abject or profane in the same way. But that was the traditional means of social control form thousands of years, whereas anything like a modern trial is only a few hundred years old.
Much as I'd love to publicly trash the other party in this case, that's roughly on parr with putting their name in Urban Dictionay with the definition, "Idiot." I might feel better, but that doesn't get the money back, nor does it do anything to improve the social standards. I commit to a certain amount of faith that, in the long run, taking the high road works.
Other than being called for potential jury duty once, I've never been involved with the court system in my life. That changes today, as I will appear in small claims court this evening.
I can't go into details about the case. It involves getting money back from someone, and that's all I can say at the moment.
It's been over a year since the actual incident that lead to this case. If I have learned anything in this, it's that getting justice in a modern liberal society is gratingly slow.
There is something I want from this process, and which I need to remind myself that courts don't provide: moral censure. There's a part of myself that wants the other guy to be strung up and publicly insulted and humiliated.
On a forum last year, I read a guy's post about a similar case: a store wouldn't give him the consignment money he thought he had a right to. He asked what he should do about this. I and others suggested small claims court or other legal recourses, but he kept pushing the point. Eventually I realized what he really wanted was public moral validation; for everyone to say, "You're a good and innocent victim, and those other people are evil bastards. Poor baby! We hate them as much as you do."
The whole point of liberal systems of justice is that social control becomes a matter of fairness and hurt vs. help, not a matter of group loyalty or deference to authority, and especially not a matter of sacredness/profanity. Those older systems of morality and social control still exist, but their influence within the justice system are supposed to be minimized. We don't draw and quarter people in the town square anymore. We don't take a person and make them abject or profane in the same way. But that was the traditional means of social control form thousands of years, whereas anything like a modern trial is only a few hundred years old.
Much as I'd love to publicly trash the other party in this case, that's roughly on parr with putting their name in Urban Dictionay with the definition, "Idiot." I might feel better, but that doesn't get the money back, nor does it do anything to improve the social standards. I commit to a certain amount of faith that, in the long run, taking the high road works.
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