Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

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> What I’m saying is, if you were stupid after your 18th birthday and caught a charge peeing on a cop car while publicly intoxicated, I don’t think that should be a factor when your 45 applying for a job after going to college, having a family, having a 20 year career, etc.

I'd go further and say a lot of charges and convictions shouldn't be a matter of public record that everyone can look up in the first place, at least not with a trivial index. File the court judgement and other documentation under a case number, ban reindexing by third parties (AI scrapers, "background check" services) entirely. That way, anyone interested can still go and review court judgements for glaring issues, but a "pissed on a patrol car" conviction won't hinder that person's employment perspectives forever.

In Germany for example, we have something called the Führungszeugnis - a certificate by the government showing that you haven't been convicted of a crime that warranted more than three months of imprisonment or the equivalent in monthly earning as a financial fine. Most employers don't even request that, only employers in security-sensitive environments, public service or anything to do with children (the latter get a certificate also including a bunch of sex pest crimes in the query).

France has a similar system to the German Führungszeugnis. Our criminal record (casier judiciaire) has 3 tiers: B1 (full record, only accessible by judges), B2 (accessible by some employers like government or childcare), and B3 (only serious convictions, the only one you can request yourself). Most employers never see anything. It works fine, recidivism stays manageable, and people actually get second chances. The US system of making everything googleable forever is just setting people up to fail.

The UK has common law: the outcomes of previous court cases and the arguments therein determine what the law is. It’s important that court records be public then, because otherwise there’s no way to tell what the law is.

It is the outcome of appellate court cases and arguments that determine law in common law jurisdictions, not the output of trial courts. Telling what the law is in a common law system would not be affected if trial court records were unavailable to the public. You only actually need appellate court records publicly available for determining the law.

The appellate court records would contain information from the trial court records, but most of the identifying information of the parties could be redacted.

There are middle grounds - for example you could redact any PII before publishing it.

That's what Ukraine does, but I guess we have more resources to keep the digital stuff running properly and not outsource it to shadycorp.

It should be possible to redact names from cases for that purpose.

It should be possible to leverage previous case law without PII.

> It’s important that court records be public then, because otherwise there’s no way to tell what the law is.

So anyone who is interested in determining if a specific behavior runs afoul of the law not just has to read through the law itself (which is, "thanks" to being a centuries old tradition, very hard to read) but also wade through court cases from in the worst case (very old laws dating to before the founding of the US) two countries.

Frankly, that system is braindead. It worked back when it was designed as the body of law was very small - but today it's infeasible for any single human without the aid of sophisticated research tools.

You are correct which is why I recently built such a tool. Well, an evidence management tool.

The premise here is, during an investigation, a suspect might have priors, might have digital evidence, might have edge connections to the case. Use the platform and AI to find them, if they exist.

What it doesn’t do: “Check this video and see if this person is breaking the law”.

What it does do: “Analyze this persons photos and track their movements, see if they intersect with Suspect B, or if suspect B shows up in any photos or video.”

It does a lot more than that but you get the idea…

The interpretation of the law is up to the courts. The enforcement of it is up to the executive. The concept of the law is up to Congress. That’s how this is supposed to work.

That can be solved by migrating to a sensible legal system instead.

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