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Every time you write about legal stuff I just feel more and more convinced that the rules are made up and the laws barely matter.
What is the point of a statute of limitations if it can be changed after the fact to include things previously protected by that statute?
What is the point of the trial related amendments if you can just have your reputation smeared and ruined by the media without anything vaguely resembling "due process"?
What problem are civil courts solving other than 'how to make lawyers rich'?
Plea deals destroying incentives to get your day in court. Prosecutors seemingly immune to any consequences of malpractice.
An old movie keeps coming up in my mind. It took me an hour of searching to find it based on my vague recollections. Interstate 60. There is a section of the movie where the main character (on a mythical road trip) takes a stop in a town called Morlaw. The entire town is comprised of lawyers that are constantly suing each other for everything (get it, Morlaw -> More Law). Any unlucky idiots that find their way to the town get caught up in the web of suing very quickly.
How does the protagonist escape? Do they make a compelling argument that this is insane? Nope, that doesn't convince any of the lawyers. They just see that as another reason to sue him.
The way the protagonist escapes is by making a call to a friend he met on the road. An ex-marketer that is dying and decides to go on a personal crusade against lying. This ex-marketer has a bomb vest strapped to him, and seems willing to use it. Yup, that's right, it takes literal terrorism to extricate the main character from a web of lawyers. The ex-marketer decides to stay around Morlaw to keep them in line.
Our legal system increasingly resembles a system of "might makes right" if you have enough powerful people on your side then the law can literally be what you want it to be. It doesn't feel like there is a legible system of rules where an underdog that is correct or in-the-right can beat the system. In the end someone might make the same realization that the ex-marketer makes. "Why play by your rules when I'm always going to lose? Why not bring violence to the table?"
That seems an odd claim to make in regard to a case in which a former President was found liable by a jury. it is also an odd claim to make re a legal system in which criminal defendants win cases every day, in which asylum seekers win cases every day, in which large corporations lose cases to individual every day, etc, etc, etc..
Why? The former president is the underdog here.
Yes, I am sure that, had he won, underdogs the world over would have rejoiced that the system works.
Why would they? Being railroaded into a trial where your innocence is impossible to disprove because it's about something that happened 30 years ago is the system failing. If that happens and he's found not guilty, that's the system still failing, just not as badly.
In order for the system to not have failed, New York would have had to not have extended the statute of limitations at all (especially since it was done specifically to get Trump).
Perhaps, but OP's claim was not that Trump was treated unjustly, but that underdogs, can't win. A very different claim.
He didn't say that underdogs can't win, he said that the rules don't lead to the underdog winning. I would agree that this is true when the rule is "no statute of limitations". There's really no way to win with this rule; the results are losing badly or losing but not too badly.
And even if you think being found innocent after a trial that never should have happened is a "win", it's a win despite the rule, not because of it.
I don't understand what you mean. First, if someone loses, then someone wins. Why the loser in this situation would be the underdog is not particularly clear to me. One would think that anything that makes it hard to sue, including statutes of limitations, would benefit the overdog, not the underdog, because the justice system is the only method that the underdog has to hold overdogs to account. Underdogs, by definition, don't have economic or political power.
Nor is it clear to me why you think that limiting the statute of limitations guarantees that the plaintiff will win. The plaintiff has the burden of proof, after all.
This isn't true on a practical level. You can have a lawsuit where both parties end up worse off, even if there's a winner in the sense "the lawyers get paid".
The justice system is a double edged sword and can be used to hurt the underdog as well as help. Ideally it would not, but we don't have an ideal one.
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