Hacker News Reader

Comment by S_A_P | Hacker News Reader

I used to think that loser pays was a magic bullet for this, but I think that it actually makes it even more difficult for the "small guy" knowing that they may have to pay Goliath's team of 1000/hr lawyers if they lose.

If the goal is to reduce the caseload in the courts, loser pays is effective. If the goal is for the reasonable access to everyone of the courts, the current system is (I hesitate to say this, but) better. I also think that when you have a class of worker(lawyers) who's job is to read/interpret/test the boundaries of/defend the law of the land, you will always find some people who figure out ways to game the system.

View on HN

Reducing the number of cases probably should be a goal, and the reasonable way to accomplish that would be for judges to be much more aggressive in dismissing bullshit. Some judges are satisfied with lifetime appointments to their current courts. If they aren't, either because they seek appointment to a higher court or because they face reelection campaigns, they have to worry about pissing off their biggest donors. Those, of course, are the lawyers who appear in their courts, who have very little interest in reducing caseload.

Local judicial positions are not lifetime positions. They are generally elected or wanted to terms.

Only federal judges and (in most states) the highest state court judges have lifetime terms.

> Reducing the number of cases probably should be a goal, and the reasonable way to accomplish that would be for judges to be much more aggressive in dismissing bullshit.

An even better way would be to eliminate laws that let people be hauled into court when they have done no harm. A huge example is the war on drugs: criminalizing mere possession of drugs, with no requirement that the person has to have harmed anyone, means a huge number of drug cases cluttering up the courts that shouldn't even have gone to court at all.

>more difficult for the "small guy" knowing that they may have to pay Goliath's team of 1000/hr lawyers if they lose.

as already posted in this thread, many countries solve this by putting a treshold on this amount to be repaid by having fixed rates for legal costs (you have to repay the legal costs but not more than those fixed rates)

What you actually want is "big guy pays" - if the loser has more than, say, two or three times the annual gross (before tax deductions or writeoffs) income of the winner, they pay the winner's legal fees. "If the winner spent more on legal fees" might also work, although I'm worried about how that would interact with contingencies and retainers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com