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AlexLawrenceSecondPaper 6 - 25 Jun 2009 - Main.EbenMoglen
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| | | What Can We Do? | | | If no major cases could go to trial because the information about the case was plastered all over the internet in such a way as to be unavoidable it would be a serious blow to the criminal justice system. If it became impossible to actually find your twelve impartial “angry men” for important and high profile cases then something would have to be done. Now I’ll admit that I do not know exactly how this might be accomplished—in terms of actually getting all this critical information distributed in such a ubiquitous way online—but it seems to me that this might be one of our main chances to actually change the system. After all, if you make a system, including the justice system, unworkable it will have to change somehow.
There are a ton of problems with this idea going all the way up to the issue of what the goals of such a movement would be. Would we demand changes to the problem of how easy it has become to subpoena personal information off the internet that a person did not realize was still extant, or any of the other issues we have discussed term? There is also the clear fear that instead of change, the organizers of a movement such as this will only get themselves in trouble and things will continue apace. My goal here was to try and start a discussion about ways that we can affect real change from our position as young law students and firebrands. The first idea that I came up with and wanted to put forward to this group was to use the internet age and an age that is beyond forgetting to reduce the efficacy and power, in whatever way, of the government and legal system that is slowly using those same tools to curtail and erode our rights, freedoms, and legal protections. | |
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-- AlexLawrence - 09 May 2009 | | | Alex, I think you miss the more obvious implication of the Oscar Grant incident: a networked society allows anyone equal opportunity to disseminate information and be heard. While this has alarming effects for individual privacy, it also exposes government itself to a much greater level of scruitiny than was possible before. If your goal is maintaining a balance of power between the citizen and the state in the face of fundamental technological change, then sousveillance might provide a partial answer without the collateral damage to the justice system that would occur under your proposed form of civil dissobedience
-- AndreiVoinigescu - 11 May 2009 | |
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- I think this is an interesting first draft. I agree with the commentators who believe that the imagined monkey-wrenching is neither a plausible social reform mechanism nor analytically persuasive as an account of the trajectory of change. I tried in my lecture on Part 6 to address the problem presented by pervasive social awareness and indestructible memory for our current version of the "naive jury" concept. [We still do not have a satisfactory way to link directly to portions of audio files on the Web, which constrains me from making good use of classroom audio.] I agree with Dana that you are not actually proposing a means to obstruct the holding of trials, and also that trying to discredit jurors' actual naivete is ethically problematic. What you really mean to do, I think, is challenge the idea of juror naivete, which as I tried to point out is not historically indivisible from the concept of the jury of the vicinage, and was in fact an outgrowth of the decay of localism. We can imagine, and have made use of, jurors of witnesses as well as fully naive juries, and everything in between, through the history of the common law. More adjustments are reasonably forseeable under present circumstances. I think that's where your next draft should be pointed: how, in more nuanced and detailed terms, does a jury system deal with a general lapse of naivete?
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