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Wellspring courts: Apologia
What is a court?
Our current, flawed thinking about what a court process should be:
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 supplied magistrate who, within modern common law jurisdictions, generally usurps power to act as a judge within a court of record where he should only be a magistrate.
What is the ideal for a court process?
Common law did well to adopt Aristotle's epistemology and acknowledge that only reason based on the evidence of the senses and introspection 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 senses and introspection; 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 using the laws of logic.
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.
Should we abandon the common law 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 trial by jury process - 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.
Until such time as we have formalized induction, we will have to continue using trial by jury. 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 the true ideal: that Aristotle's law of identity itself -- reason itself -- be the final appellate authority.
When induction is finally formalized, it is within the intended future of Wellspring that a new court process will be adopted which hardcodes the rules of valid inference into the proceedings and drastically reduces the discretion of both judges and juries, to interpret the constitution, and to reason about the facts and the meaning of the laws when arriving at judgments.
[Apologia]: Outline in more detail how the transition could/should be approached