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.

  • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Without defending our legal system, keep in mind that:

    1. Any way of governing, say, a city of 100K people (to say nothing of a nation with 300+ million people) is going to be complex.
    2. A lot of the problems in our legal system started out as solutions to older problems.
    3. All of the individual parts of our legal system -- elections, legislatures, lobbyists, executives, the judiciary, lawyers, paralegals, cops, etc. -- all have (and likely need) at least some rules that are uniquely adapted to their specific roles.

    In short, the root problem (how should we govern ourselves?) is extraordinarily complicated and even a vastly-improved legal system will be similarly complicated, which will make it functionally opaque in many places and to many people. Improvements can be made, sure, but your "I can't even begin to imagine an alternative" intuition is reasonable.

    That said, if I had to invent a legal system for a socialist utopia from scratch, here are a few important features I would include:

    1. Guaranteeing everyone the means of decent living (housing, healthcare, education, a jobs guarantee or something like UBI, etc.). Eliminating financial precariousness would go a long ways towards reducing crime and cutting down on the civil caseload, too. A thought I often have is how many car accident cases would be litigated if medical bills were a thing of the past.
    2. In addition to better education overall, more education on the legal system specifically. Some of the problems in our legal system are genuine problems, but some are widely seen as problems only because people aren't very informed about the situation.
    3. A far greater emphasis on access and timeliness. Right now legal advice is effectively inaccessible to many people, and even if you have a lawyer cases can drag on for years. There are reasons for all of this, but not reasons so compelling that a society that really gave a shit couldn't solve them.

    These are where I'd start at a high level; I personally think the common law/civil law distinction isn't that great, especially in the U.S.