| > "some courts now require some parties to resort to ADR of some type, usually mediation, before permitting the parties' cases to be tried" Yes, and I think that represents a great threat to justice, for the same reasons. If courts are too slow and expensive, let's address those problems directly, not throw out the whole court system. > Do you really want external juries to decide what internal policies mean? Maybe. A jury of ordinary people provides an important sanity-check on the law. If the policy relies on some abstruse definition of sexual harassment that goes against the common-sense meaning of the term, maybe it's a bad policy. > Really, your 'move to another town' view of our ancestors was until recently only really possible for the privileged few Do you argue that electoral fraud doesn't matter because until recently the vote was only granted to a privileged few? The right response to privileges is to extend them to everyone, not to weaken them. > Making that membership list public would certainly have lead to retaliation against the members. Your call for a transparent society is, quite literally, un-Constitutional and would break that "ancestral legal environment" that you praise elsewhere. Plus, you want to abolish medical privacy and other laws we already have, like the Video Privacy Protection Act put into place after Bork's video tape rental history was published for the world to see. You're putting words in my mouth. Yes, there are counterpressures, specific cases where opacity is necessary to society. But secret laws and secret courts are among the deepest horrors of totalitarianism. > You mention FOIA requests. You do realize that FOIA requests can take years to resolve, right? If someone is violating workplace rules (let's say a ban on drinking caffeine at work), do you really think that a multi-year process, with recourse to the equivalent of a defense attorney, is appropriate before being able to carry out any corrective action? There were times when we said things like "better a thousand guilty go free than a single innocent be wrongly convicted". When you're talking about "corrective action" with the kind of impact on someone's life that this public firing will have, yes, I do think that the basic rights to due process, legal representation, and one's day in public court are appropriate. If you can't provide that without a multi-year process, the problems are with your process, not the responsibility of the accused. > You propose that every single claim be made public, yet somehow believe that won't be used to bring the "powerful weapon" of the internet to bear on innocent people? Not at all. I just want to know the actual judgement of facts. I think that's vital to the public interest. > Could you at least try to answer my questions? Since I feel like all I'm getting from you is unsubstantiated belief, with no understanding of the difficulties, or the historical realities. It comes across like you are from a privileged position in life, eg, as a member of a majority ethnic, religious, etc. group which has never had to worry about how public knowledge of who you are can lead to social ostracism or physical punishment. Oh, come off it; I'm engaging, you're just dismissing the opinion of anyone you disagree with. Did you copy-paste that? |