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Chapter 25: Justice for Humans, Not Lawyers

The war room was buzzing. Julian’s "Ten Commandments" speech from the day before had laid down a powerful philosophical marker, but it had also opened a Pandora's box of difficult, practical questions. The team was now tasked with turning that grand philosophy into a concrete set of policies.

“It’s a beautiful idea, Julian,” Marcus Thorne said, playing his usual role of the resident skeptic. “Burning down the legal code. Very revolutionary. But the devil, as they say, is in the details. What does this actually look like?”

Julian stood at the whiteboard, a calm, focused expression on his face. “It looks like we start by identifying and removing the most perverse incentives in the current system,” he began. “The core problem is that our civil justice system has stopped being primarily about justice. It has become a financial lottery.”

This was the heart of the matter, the most radical and controversial part of his entire legal platform.

“We are going to propose the near-total elimination of non-economic damages in civil lawsuits,” he stated.

A stunned silence fell over the room. Anya Sharma looked at him, her eyes wide with a mixture of shock and intellectual curiosity.

“You’re telling me,” Marcus said, his voice dangerously quiet, “that if a woman is raped, she can’t sue her attacker for pain and suffering?”

“No, Marcus,” Julian corrected him calmly. “I am saying that the primary response of a just society to a horrific crime like rape should be the swift, certain, and severe punishment of the attacker by the state. That is justice. It is the criminal prosecution, the long prison sentence. What we have done is to bolt on a secondary system, a civil lawsuit, that turns a quest for justice into a potential get-rich-quick scheme.”

He continued, his voice steady. “The current system incentivizes greed. It clogs our courts with lawsuits, many of them frivolous, that are not seeking justice, but a jackpot. It devalues the very concept of justice by reducing it to a financial transaction. A victim’s compensation should be for tangible, quantifiable damages: medical bills, lost wages, property damage. That is a matter of making a person whole. The punishment for the crime itself belongs to the state, not to a plaintiff’s bank account.”

“The trial lawyers will have your head on a spike,” Marcus muttered.

“They are precisely the parasitic class we are targeting,” Julian replied without missing a beat. He then moved to the next, equally controversial point.

“Statutes of limitation,” he said. “We are going to propose a radical shortening and simplification of the statute of limitations for all but the most heinous violent crimes, like murder.”

Anya pushed back. “But what about justice for old crimes? What if a victim is too afraid to come forward for years?”

“That is a compassionate question,” Julian said, “but it ignores two fundamental realities. First, the scientific reality of memory. Cognitive science is unequivocal on this point: human memory is not a recording device. It is a deeply flawed, reconstructive process, highly susceptible to suggestion, bias, and simple decay over time. A trial based on the hazy, emotionally charged memories of events that happened decades ago is not a reliable system for ascertaining truth. It is a disservice to both the accused and the accuser.”

“And second,” he added, “is the philosophical reality that people can change. A legal system with nearly infinite statutes of limitation is a system of perpetual punishment. It implicitly states that a person is defined, forever, by the worst mistake of their past. A just system, a humane system, must allow for the possibility of redemption.”

Marcus smirked. “Tell that to the #MeToo movement. You’re going to get crucified.”

“The current climate, where a clumsy, consensual sexual encounter from twenty years ago is treated with the same gravity as a violent assault, is a perfect example of the system’s failure,” Julian shot back, his voice hardening. “It is a system that devalues the horror of real crime by equating it with minor social transgressions. We must have the courage to make distinctions. To have a sense of proportion.”

Finally, he tied it all back to the core principle of simplicity. He brought up the examples of Trump’s bankruptcies and Musk’s refusal to pay his bills.

“These are not the actions of criminal masterminds,” he said. “They are the rational actions of powerful people who know that the system is too complex and too expensive for the average person to fight. The solution is not more complexity. The solution is a ruthless, beautiful simplicity. A simple, principle-based law is harder to game. ‘A person who controls an entity is responsible for the debts of that entity.’ A jury understands that. ‘You must not defraud.’ A jury understands that.”

He stepped back, the core of the radical new platform now laid bare on the board. A system with no financial lottery for victimhood. A system with a clear and finite memory. A system built on simple principles, not on a million complicated rules.

It was a vision of a legal system for humans, not for lawyers. And it was, he knew, the single most dangerous and revolutionary idea he had proposed yet.

The Discourse, 25; The Jurisprudence of First Principles

Section 25.1: The Decoupling of Justice and Compensation

The centerpiece of the proposed civil reform—the elimination of non-economic damages for pain, suffering, and emotional distress—is a radical and deeply counter-cultural idea. It is a direct assault on the foundational economic model of the modern American civil justice system. The Corbin campaign's argument is that the current system has conflated two fundamentally different social functions: justice and insurance.

• The Justice Function: The societal process of determining fault and punishing wrongdoing. In this view, the appropriate response to a crime like rape is the swift, certain, and severe punishment of the perpetrator by the state.

• The Insurance Function: The societal process of compensating individuals for loss and suffering. In this view, the appropriate response to the trauma of an assault is therapeutic and medical support, which should be covered by a functional healthcare system or a specific victim's compensation fund.

The MARG platform argues that by tying massive, lottery-like financial payouts to the justice function, the current system has corrupted both. It turns a quest for justice into a potential get-rich-quick scheme, which perversely incentivizes greed-driven lawsuits. It also creates a system where the "justice" a victim receives is often dependent not on the severity of their suffering, but on the perceived depth of the defendant's pockets. The proposal to decouple these two functions is an attempt to restore the integrity of the justice system, reframing it as a search for truth and accountability, not a vehicle for financial enrichment.

Section 25.2: The Jurisprudence of Memory and Redemption

The proposal to radically shorten statutes of limitation for most crimes is grounded in two distinct and powerful philosophical arguments.

1. The Cognitive Science Argument: This is based on the overwhelming scientific evidence of the fallibility of human memory. Decades of research in cognitive psychology have shown that memory is not a reliable recording device. It is a reconstructive process, highly susceptible to suggestion, bias, and simple decay over time. The Corbin campaign's argument is that a justice system that allows for trials based on decades-old memories is not a just system. It is a system that invites wrongful convictions and acquittals based on unreliable and often emotionally charged testimony.

2. The Philosophical Argument: This is based on a belief in the possibility of redemption and personal change. A legal system with extremely long or non-existent statutes of limitation is a system that implicitly believes a person is defined, forever, by the worst act of their past. It is a system of perpetual punishment. A system with shorter, clearer statutes of limitation is one that, while still punishing wrongdoing, allows for the possibility that a person can change, pay their debt to society, and move forward. It is a choice between a legal philosophy of permanent condemnation and one that allows for the possibility of a second act.

Section 25.3: Principle-Based Law vs. Contingency-Based Law

The final set of proposals—using simple, broad principles to close the loopholes exploited by the powerful—is the culmination of the entire legal reform platform. It is an argument for a fundamental shift from a contingency-based legal system to a principle-based one.

• Contingency-Based Law (The Status Quo): This is a system that attempts to write a specific rule for every conceivable action and contingency. The result is a multi-million-word legal code that is incomprehensible and full of inevitable gaps and contradictions, which the wealthy can hire experts to exploit.

• Principle-Based Law (The MARG Proposal): This is a system built on a few, simple, and universally understandable principles (e.g., "You are responsible for the debts of the entities you control").

The argument is that a simple, principle-based system is ultimately more robust and harder to game. While a clever lawyer can always find a way around a specific, detailed rule, it is much harder to argue to a jury of one's peers that one has not violated a clear, common-sense principle. This is a deeply democratic vision of the law, one that seeks to return the power of judgment from a small, elite class of legal experts to the common sense of the citizenry.