[Cushman]

> And I say lawyers ruin everything because the legal profession has a vested interest in keeping the lay person from being able to understand and use the law effectively.

This may be true, but it is not the reason law is hard for the lay person to understand.

Western legal theory has taken "justice" to mean that, given the same facts, and irrespective of the personal opinions of the judge or jury, the court should reach the same decision. Just think about that for a second-- it's not an easy problem. In fact it's a fabulously difficult problem, even before you add the condition that the system should remain fair over time in excess of a human lifespan.

The (clearly sub-optimal) solution we've arrived at over the past few thousand years is basically to implement an enormous natural-language virtual machine in which individual agents (lawyers) execute programs (laws) using a very precisely-defined instruction set (legal jargon) which is very similar in structure to English. The reason the laws cannot be written in English is that English has natural ambiguities; this is fine for conversation, but is absolutely unacceptable when human freedom or livelihood is on the line.

The obvious downside is that it means that average citizens can actually not learn the law simply by reading the law. To mitigate that, we've constructed an execution context in which a separate lawyer represents each interested party, with a judge acting as a neutral third party present to represent the interests of the law. The jury is asked only to establish the facts; understanding of the law is not required. It's really all pretty clever.

Obviously it's not perfect. But, before you criticize the system wholesale, remember that law didn't always work this way. Time was you would just take your grievance before the king, and depending on if he was feeling merciful or surly or liked your family, you would either get what you wanted or not. If you were lucky, there would be rhyme or reason to the king's judgments, and you might be able to predict what he'd say. If not, well... sucks to be you.

The complexity of the law, the cost of employing full-time legal scholars for every interaction, and the occasional abuses of the system-- these are the price we pay for fairness.

I'm not saying I think lawyers are awesome, but a world without them would be a hell of a lot worse than most people think.

[Retric]

That's only true on the surface. In the US lawyers execute not just statue (laws written by the legislator and signed into law by the executive that have yet to be over turned) but case law. Which acts as a single vary large multidimentional training set that's clear at the extremes but vary vague in the middle. The reason it's vague is people pretend there is far more stability in the system than actually exists so there is case law supporting any vaguely reasonable line of argument. Thus, lawyers are there not to help interpret the law, but create the most reasonable argument supporting their clients goals and providing their clients feedback to how well that argument might stand up in court. Under this interpretation you can clearly see how a talented team of lawyers can help bend the law to their client's point of view and 'distort' the impartiality of the system.

[Cushman]

Case law is still about fairness, though. The ideal is that the same facts should be decided the same way. Of course, since no case ever has exactly the same circumstances as a previous one, there's always some wiggle room to argue that this one is more like that one or the other one and so should be decided in that particular way. The adversarial system is a way to try to balance that; you make your best argument, I make my best argument, and somebody disinterested decides which one they buy.

Saying "you can use case law to support any argument" is hyperbole; you can use any case which was been decided the way you'd like in the past, and the older the statute the more cases have been decided and the more wiggle room you have. But it's not a binary thing; the strength of your argument is affected by how similar the circumstances are, how much body of precedent there is for and against, how close the jurisdiction was, the reasoning given for the previous decision, and many other factors.

Of course this is really hard to keep track of if you're not a full-time legal scholar in that particular area of law, and it makes the whole thing seem even more impenetrable to the rest of us. But again, it's all in the spirit of fairness. It's not perfect, but consider the alternative: a justice system where previous decisions didn't matter -- where the law was just "the law", decided fresh by whatever judge you happen to stand before -- would be far more capricious.