# Wellspring courts: Apologia

# What is a court?

## Common law and its shortcomings:

Traditionally speaking, we tend to think that common law is a process which attempts to make a man subject only to those laws which his fellow man would hold him subject to - and this is the purpose of the jury: the jury has the power to acquit a defendant who has violated a law which the common people do not believe is just.

Common law attempts to grant the common man a veto over the government's power both in the sense that:
- It is a jury of common men who reason over the facts and the law. Recall that in a court of record, the magistrate is **not** a judge and does **not** have the power of tribunal, and is merely a staff of the plaintiff's court, so the government's power over the proceeding is curtailed severely.
- The jury's own powers of reasoning determine the judgment, and not the preferences of the government's judge, usurping power to act as a judge within a court of record where he should be only a magistrate.

## What went wrong with common law?

Common law did well to adopt Aristotle's epistemology and acknowledge that only reason based on the evidence of the 5 senses could validly arrive at objective conclusions. It was due to this recognition that the common law constrained the criteria for valid evidence and witness testimony to that which could be directly testified to by the five senses; and the jury was to serve as the independent, unbiased, reasoning mind that took in the facts in evidence and reasoned itself to the verdict.

Considered in this way, we can see that the common law process was *trying* to be a sound, reasoning mind that applied the Aristotelian laws of valid inference to the facts in evidence that were brought forward in order to objectively settle a dispute.

The ideal for a court process is **not** that a jury of peers should be the final court of appeal. The ideal that common law was striving to arrive at was that Aristotelian reason itself, the law of Identity, the one true arbiter of objectivity, should be the final court of appeal. The common law tried, but failed to implement an Aristotelian reasoning process.

Its failure however, was not due to its goal being flawed, but to our knowledge being incomplete. To wit, we know the rules of valid **deductive** inference. Deductive logic has been well understood ever since Aristotle formalized it during his floruit. But deductive reasoning is not all that comprises reasoning: there is also induction. Thus, because we have not yet found a genius philosopher who could formalize and explicate for us the rules of valid inductive generalization, we could not eliminate the bias of individual human judges and juries from the common law process. The trial by jury is the common law's stand-in for a pure, unbiased reasoning court process.

Even at the time of this writing, we still have not yet formalized induction. For this reason, Wellspring will also have to adopt the imperfect common law process with trial by jury - and moreover, we will still have the Achilles' heel of activist judges who will refuse to merely read the constitution as an input, and reason about its contents to draw valid inferences about whether or not a particular law is constitutional, in a originalist fashion, but will instead interpret the text of the constitution to draw the conclusions which their personal politics would prefer.

But understand that the aspiration goal of an individualist court system is **not** for a jury to be the final appellate authority. Trial by jury is an imperfect substitute for what the true ideal is: that Aristotle's **law of identity** itself -- that pure reason itself -- be the final appellate authority.