What would a just legal system even look like in a socialist society? It seems like the legal system under capitalism still holds on to a lot of weird feudal stuff, so it’s kind of hard for me to get my head around what would come after this, if we completely destroyed the bourgeois legal system.
I have no education in law and it all seems intentionally opaque, so I feel like I can’t even begin to imagine an alternative.
It was really smart for its time...
...in the 12th and 13th centuries.
Common law was important, because prior to it every little lord Fauntleroy and baron was making up their own rules as they went along and it was impossible to get any kind of cohesion between the feudal lords of England.
Seriously, it's kinda hard to wrap our brains around it but most social structures are ridiculously outdated. I knew that the U.S. Constitution was the oldest "constitutional document" but did you know that it's also among the least amended constitutional documents? We haven't changed the bases of our codes of laws in way too long; the internet alone has drastically changed the world and most legal systems aren't designed for an Internet world, they've merely been adapted to work in an Internet world.
Yep, and this is a big reason why I think the US is gonna collapse or balkanize or something in the coming years. Whether you're talking a nation or like, bacteria... organisms that can adapt and change are the ones that survive. American government, culture, society... it's all just so massively sclerotic and inflexible. Completely uninnovative and unable to handle even relatively straightforward challenges like COVID-19 (straightforward in that the solution to slowing it down is well known, we just don't want to do it). The country will allow itself to collapse before they even consider something smart like doing away with the Senate.
Going further down the rabbit hole, also think about who we call "legal scholars" nowadays; the real good ones all died out in the 40's and 50's like the economists. They don't, like, study laws as an abstract concept anymore. Here's a (1987) paper I skimmed written by Mark Tushnet of Georgetown that makes a similar observation. They study the laws we currently have in place and how best to bend them to their political advantage. Just like in any other serious area of discussion, the window of available "legal studies" is shuttered to what we already have in place with a degree or two of leeway on either side.
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