Today in Supreme Court History: December 26, 1907

12/26/1907: Lonzo Bailey entered into written labor contract with the Riverside Corporation. This contract gave rise to Bailey v. Alabama (1911).

The White Court (1911)

 

Comments

[DaivdBehar]

Contract law is in utter failure, and toxic garbage, damaging our economy. In this case, they called the cops to enforce a contract dispute. Most contracts under $million are unenforceable by the toxic lawyer profession. You are going to need $50000 to hire a lawyer. The rent seeking, worthless lawyers get paid to write the contracts, to explain their inscrutable language. They get paid to sue to defend, and to judge. Contract law is a toxic lawyer profession bunko operation. These worthless lawyer rent seeking fraudulent schemes should require fonts bigger than 12, and language readability less than the 6th grade. The adverse terms should be in a bold black box so parties cannot avoid reading them. Or, these worthless contracts, damaging our economy should be void. Lawyer nitpicking is in bad faith. It should carry the criminal penalties of perjury.

I recall the case of a plane that was shot down. A law firm associate found the ticket terms limiting damages to $50000 was written in the wrong font, cancelling the limit. That is ridiculous. The limit was unfair. His nitpicking was unfair. The lawyer profession must be crushed to save our nation.

Compare to eBay. If someone has won my CD for one cent, I am highly motivated to keep my promise. Although I lose money on this sale, I can get good ratings. If I get a lot of poor ratings, I can be excluded from this multi-billion dollar market. Imagine enforcing such a promise through the most toxic occupation in our nation, more toxic than organized crime.

Replace stupid, worthless, rent seeking contract law with ratings and market exclusions.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

Usually your rants are just rants, to my taste; sometimes there is a nugget buried somewhere in the rant. This time, I agree with one little phrase:

Most contracts under $million are unenforceable by the toxic lawyer profession. You are going to need $50000 to hire a lawyer. The rent seeking, worthless lawyers get paid to write the contracts, to explain their inscrutable language. They get paid to sue to defend, and to judge.

There are many solutions. One of the simplest is to get rid of the legal monopoly held by lawyers. You may have said somewhere that lawyers should be forbidden from being legislators and judges; I don't think that would solve anything, because no matter what laws say, they always have edge cases and loopholes. Interpretation is always a subjective matter. What do "beyond reasonable doubt", "probably cause", "clear preponderence of the evidence" actually mean, both absolutely and in relation to each other?

I put together a bunch of ideas for my libertopia. I'd be curious as to your reaction.

In my libertopia, all laws, contracts, etc -- all documents which claim to have legal force -- have to be clear, consistent (internally; compared to other similar legal documents by the same entity; and as enforced), minimal, relevant, etc. The ultimate judge is a jury of 12, randomly chosen with only enough voir dire to weed out the insane. If even a single one of those 12 says he cannot understand the legal document, or thinks it is defective as outlined above, it is voided in its entirety.

In my libertopia, all warrants are authored and executed by the parties to a case, or, of course, people they hire. Warrants are legal documents and thus must also be clear, consistent, minimal, relevant, etc, and can be appealed by their targets on those grounds. But there are no restrictions for "probably cause"; as long as you can show it's relevant etc, and beat the target's appeal, you can execute it.

The trick is that excessive warrants are self-enforcing; if your execution exceeds the written warrant, such as searching underwear drawers for a stolen six foot TV, then the warrant rebounds on you -- your target gets to do to you what you did to them. So do all warrants by the losing party; if you cannot prove your neighbor stole your TV, they get to search your house just as you searched them. Of course, most people would accept sufficient cash in lieu of returning the favor, negotiated by the two parties.

I don't claim this should be the legal system coming out of a revolution. I was trying only to come up with some kind of legal system that would not need libraries full of dusty precedent, expensive lawyers, convoluted laws, etc. It's an exercise in thinking differently, and has been a lot of fun.

[DaivdBehar]

MS Word has a readability level function. All legal utterances should be at or below the 6th grade level, or they are void. That is measurable.

As to those vague legal terms, they were cool in 1275 AD when they were plagiarized from the Catholic Catechism. Not cool today. They all violate the Establishment Clause. They all violate the Equal Protection Clauses of the Fifth and of the Fourteenth Amendment, because they are subjective. They will be differently applied at all levels of discretion and will depend on personal bias of the police, of the prosecutor, of the judge, of the jury. Such people will favor people like themselves, and use them against people they do not like. This is not just incompetence and rent seeking toxicity of the toxic lawyer profession. This is all out insurrection against our constitution for rent seeking purposes.

I do not support violence because it is not persuasive. I do support the mass arrests of the lawyer hierarchy, 25000 internal traitors to our nation. Try them for an hour. The sole evidence would be their legal writings. Then, sentence them to 10 years hard labor in federal prison. To deter.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

Right there, you've failed my internal consistency check.

I do not support violence because it is not persuasive. I do support the mass arrests of the lawyer hierarchy, 25000 internal traitors to our nation. Try them for an hour. The sole evidence would be their legal writings. Then, sentence them to 10 years hard labor in federal prison.

How do you accomplish arrests and imprisonment without violence?

And your count is woefully low. Google found several sites claiming there are 1.3 million lawyers in the US.

[DaivdBehar]

There are 1.3 million lawyers. If the public is oppressed by this Inquisitorial hierarchy, the lawyer is doubly oppressed, and the regular judge triply oppressed. They have no free speech rights. The smartest most experienced in the court is totally shut down from his function, the judge.

I see legal liability as a good alternative to endless cycles of violence. Such cycles make it impossible to do anything other than survive.

I am the beat friend of the lawyer profession. It will shrink by 50%. Its income will quadruple, and its public esteem will rise 10 fold. They will begin to add great value to our economy and to our nation's success. This hierarchy stands in the way of any change.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

One of the puzzles for me is, who funds these cases? Wikipedia on this particular case is pretty bare. I know a lot of the Jim Crow wins at the Supreme Court were funded by the NAACP and similar organizations; is that what happened here?

Are here any good sources for general information on these cases? Wikipedia is pretty hit or miss, and the link in the article itself is almost always worthless. Google usually finds lots of legal in-depth articles, but I'd like to find something between those and Wikipedia.

[DaivdBehar]

Some industry lobbied to criminalize a employee-employer dispute, and to have the employee arrested over a $15 disagreement. As a tax payer and as a real crime victim, I object.

[Enrique]

Wow, it is Holmes's dissent that is toxic! Why hasn't he been cancelled yet?

[Bored Lawyer]

Holmes' dissent is really bad. I don't believe in cancelling anyone, but he really blew that one.

[Bill Poser]

Am I wrong in thinking that the contract sets inconsistent rates of pay: first $12 per month, then $10.75 per month?