U.S. Continental Congress not primarily lawyers, + good luck gives early phase out of slavery?

Thank you for an excellent post, even though I suspect we have a fair amount of disagreement. :)

Okay, let me ask you this, the example from the early American colonies in which a man with no legal experience was asked to accept a judicial appointment. He was advised, listen carefully and sincerely to both sides and come to what in your mind is a fair resolution. You will almost always be correct. But do not give your reasoning, for you’d almost always be incorrect.

Or if a skilled poker player is asked to provide a running commentary of their thinking, he or she is likely to play worse. Or a doctor, if he or she is asked to provide a full running commentary, say on when they’re feeling their way on what to do next with a tricky case of pneumonia, it’s likely to get in the way of their best doctoring.
Eh, not really. That would depend on the whim and on the caprice of the personal opinion of the judge. That is a recipe of arbitrariness, since what is fair to one person is different to what is fair to another. And a judge could then intentionally give an unfair decision since he does not have to explain why he came up with that decision.

A simple law is often inadequate because clever people find loopholes. So you amend your law to plug loopholes. But that create new loopholes so more laws a created to plug those loopholes. Then you have a complex and complicated law.

Also simple laws are often absolute. Thou shall not kill is very simple. But then you need exceptions like war and self defense. So that gets added to laws. But someone would abuse it by killing someone claiming self defense by provoking the other to attack first. Another is contract law. Contracts are suppposed to be binding between parties. But what if that contract was procured by fraud? So you make a law, etc. What if you are selling a human being? So you make another law banning contracts. What about interest? Collateral? What is reasonable and unreasonable?



Laws are complex and complicated because life is often complicated. Things like insurance, inheritance, loans,and securities, corporations, land ownership, labor relations, military and naval forces, etc need laws. Laws governing them can never be so simple.
 
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Two names.
Perhaps not immediately pertinent to ARW and the continental congress, but two names.
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Both helped maintain colonial structures and the imposition of western culture regardless of what the maps got changed to say after their protests. Last time I checked, South Afirca and India both have Prime Ministers instead of say a king for the first and a Padishah Emperor for the second.
 
. . . Things like insurance, inheritance, loans,and securities, corporations, land ownership, labor relations, military and naval forces, . . .
You bring up good examples.

All the same, more non-lawyers trying to keep complexity down will lead to a different system. Which is part of what I'm after, along with a move afoot to phase out slavery, regional jealousy on the part of other southern states to clip Mississippi's wings due to their headstart on manufacturing, etc. I do like the approach of starting with the worse of the worse, which is probably Mississippi.

On the issue of systems and complexity, if you want to see where I'm coming from, I'm very impressed with pilot and aviation writer William Langewiesche, specifically when he drives into the ValuJet flight which crashed in the Everglades in 1996. His point is that complexity comes at a somewhat greater cost that we generally acknowledge. Of course, we need some complexity, so it's not all one or the other.
 
On the legal system,

When our house got flooded when I was age, I observed my parents fighting with the insurance company and with each other. The insurance company was low-balling and delaying, which to them is standard practice, but it's a pretty harmful standard practice. What I wanted was to haul the CEO of insurance company into court and listened and see him or her lectured to by the judge. Well, that wasn't going to happen.

I remember when I got my first apartment at age 20 after living in the dorm for a year. The apartment lease was like eight pages, a standard TAA lease (Texas Apartment Association) and was seemingly all in the landlord's favor.

Of course, these are the mildest of examples. But we are a long way from Code of Hammurabi in which, The First Duty of Government is to Protect the Powerless Against the Powerful. Too often and in fact, most of the time it's quite the opposite. Government and law is more a handmaiden for the already rich and powerful.
 
Many of the more unjust complications of the legal system exist for the benefit of businessmen, such as the insurance companies and the landlords and the lawyers. Many of the historical unjust complications were for the preservation of slavery. Many of the unjust simple things in the legal system, such as restricting voting rights to white men, were for the preservation of slavery.
I fail to see how selecting one group of the rich and powerful and decreasing their numbers in the Continental Congress, and replacing them with a group of nearly identical rich and powerful people would solve any of the problems your describing, especially when the only difference is less familiarity. You'd wind up with a system of laws with the exact same injustices and probably a less robust bill of rights.

Your earlier industrialization in the south is a much better POD.
 
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