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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

We do not have a right to equal representation.

I'm not sure that's the case here. It's a matter of knowledge transfer.

Lawyers know things. People with money can afford to get knowledge from lawyers. People without money cannot afford to get knowledge from lawyers.

It's not a problem with the "system" that mathematicians know more about math than the general public, and that people who have the money can hire a mathematician to do math for them.

It's a knowledge transfer problem. How do you solve that? You can't give every person a massive book of every law when they're born. It's impractical to store, and they'd be outdated the next day. All of the laws are online for anyone to read, but who has the time?

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People have struggled with "online for anyone to read" for the law.

Cornell's Legal Information Institute, for instance,

https://www.law.cornell.edu/

hasn't had the easiest time getting funding although it is produced on a shoestring and clearly delivers a huge amount of value for what goes into it.

State legislators and vendors have long tried to make people pay for access to the law, it seems in the long term courts have come to realize that there is no excuse, access to the law is not for high paid lawyers, but can and should be free because it is not expensive to provide in the electronic age and since you have to follow the law they don't need to give you the excuse that you can't afford to read it.

A huge problem with the system is that the laws are not understandable without significant study. Law school is ridiculously expensive. The average cost of a law degree right now is about $200,000. This makes legal representation insanely expensive.

A step towards equal representation would start by heavily subsidizing law school making them accessible to everyone. Also, we would need to fund the creation of more law schools. In addition we should fund public defenders an order of magnitude more than we currently do.

https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-law-school#:~:text....

As someone who became a 'jailhouse lawyer' I disagree. Once you understand the basics it's pretty understandable, and it's self documenting with our use of case law. Now, the fact that to read the cases, which are the texts of 'the law' since we use case law and you have to pay a fortune to Lexus Nexus should be illegal. If the text of the cases ARE the law of the land (which the whole case law thing demonstrates is the case) then the laws of the land should not be allowed to be locked up behind a paywall. Free access to Lexus Nexus in prison shows it is REQUIRED for fair access to the legal system (they don't give you anything they aren't constitutionally required to in prison), yet prison is the only place you get 'free' access (I mean, I paid for it via the loss of freedom, opportunity, days of my life, etc).

However, if say you wanted to offer your help to someone else, you would in fact be breaking the law. You cannot represent other people or offer legal advice without first spending 200 grand on a degree. I agree that the US should offer an equivalent alternative to Lexus Nexus. The law should never be behind a paywall.

The prisons and terms of my supervised release were required to allow me to continue helping inmates I had been helping previously (making an acception to the condition that I not associate with felons and requiring the prison to allow such correspondence). I wonder if that small crack that gives court recognized and enforced legal protection to me continuing to practice law without a degree could be used to break this gatekeeping?

You weren't representing yourself as a lawyer, with them or in court. I'm assuming that's both the potential problem and the work around.

I wrote their motions to the court, helped them file them, etc. I got a dozen people released during COVID, and those with lawyers adopted some of my work for their other cases. Sure seemed like 'lawyering' :)

... do inmates get free access to LexisNexis?

Maybe? They have an offering for prisons: https://www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/corrections/default.page

In the Feds yes.

>It's not a problem with the "system" that mathematicians know more about math than the general public

One of the historical high watermarks in legal history is the existence of the twelve tables, a highly condensed, shortened version of roman law which was prominently displayed in public market places and other easily accessible fora - specifically to allow non-patricians to understand and have access to the law.

Other moments in legal history have ruling classes enacting legislation in languages which the common-folk don't even speak.

We exist along a spectrum between 'everyone knows and understands' to 'nearly no one knows and understands', but don't take the difficulty of fixing the issue with the idea that it isn't a problem in the first place. It is a problem, and it's a large one.

I think there's an analogue in dealing with customer service as well. Folks who are better communicators and all that often get their interests best protected when dealing with rogue employees at companies that did some unsavory shenanigans that need to be undone by the customer. I've been delegated these customer service call tasks from my family members because they don't have the ability to ask the right questions and drill in and get answers and actions from others as fluently as I.

This is not what I think the comment was about. Of course, with the increasing complexity of society the complexity of its rules can increase as well. The idea that equal representation through equal knowledge/access to knowledge is the solution is not realistic. But society should give everyone a fair chance by providing him with access to a lawyer, especially in those challenging situations. Also, in the end, those rules are not a law of nature. They can change, or should change if the resulting system is not accessible by all. If the complexity can only be handles by specialised, expensive lawyers then it will always lead to gross inequality.

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