| > This kind of latitude is really valuable, as it recognises the fact that things are pretty complicated and that in the end the law is there to ensure justice, not to mechanically interpret a set of rules. It's also entirely dependent on judges being nice and reasonable people, who will judge according to common sense standards of "what is right" shared by a solid majority. This just isn't true. If anything, judges are likely to be less reasonable than random regular people, because 1. They have an education where argument is treated as a sport, and objective measures of bias or correctness play little part. 2. They belong to a class who firmly believe (and society backs them up on it and tries as hard as it can to make it reality) that their opinions are worth more than ordinary people's. That was always my problem with libertarians, their eagerness look to the legal system to solve social problems (contracts, etc.). The judicial branch is the worst of all branches of government. Sensible people don't go there to get justice, it's where you go when you've given up getting justice any other way. A judge is just as likely (if not more) to protect an unjust order as to overturn it when it's really called for. Ethereum provides a way to guarantee desirable outcomes without such arbitrariness (in the very literal sense). It failed to do so with the DAO, but at least there, bugs can be fixed. It's much harder to fix unjust judges. |