I would not presume that I know enough about our legal system to pick it apart and point to the mechanics or structural issues which doesn’t work at this stage, but I am sure there are some. What I do know is, that the legal system is highly undemocratic, favouring people of wealth over people of numbers.
If you have the money to hire a single lawyer, which most people across the world does not, you get a weapon by which to navigate the laws of our society which is unavailable to the common person.
If you have the money to hire multiple lawyers, which some people do, you get to bend the rules when you step over a line. This causes society to slowly change towards allowing bad actors to decide what we can and cannot do, because the system inherently is self-referencial.
If you do not have the money for any lawyers, and do not have the time to study law yourself, you must rely on your governments, who elect and revise our laws. Unfortunately, it is no secret that money can influence politics through lobbying, advertisement and more, so if you feel something is unjust, apart from a bad street light maybe, there is little you can do without getting rich first or causing a revolt.
These are the two mechanisms by which societal laws are largely regulated: A few individuals are unhappy with what the majority wants, and by spending money they pull in one direction. At some point their wealth is so large that they have more power than the rest of the world, and either the majority of people will succomb to lowering of their living standards or revolt. The seesaw of history, a dance of conflict which extends as far back as our legal system. It sucks.
The ebb and flow of history is moving too slowly for our current climate crisis. We have a responsibility to our future generations to fight united as an entire global community to save as many people we can. We are doing our best, but politics and law as it currently stands is not moving fast enough, and we need to create a better system.
Again, I am not a legal expert, but I have a few thoughts none the less:
The main thing I want to get rid of is the paper analogy. This is enourmously confusing, and the git model has been used to recreate the legal system of France and USA, which seem to provide a legal foundation which is much easier to navigate.
Second, I would allow open discussions on laws, direct polling and more. This requires enormous levels of security, which we could attain by creating public social media platforms, with strict ID requirements. An “open” internet where everyone is showing themselves like we attempt to do with some social media platforms, in contrast to the “dark” web, where privacy is maintained and you are responsible for your own security, much like the web is today.
Third, the law should be written in a language that 80% of the population can understand and the law as a speciality should be abolished. I realize a lot of very rich people would “lose their jobs” but no, they will be rewarded highly while we make the transition. It shouldn’t take more than a generation or two.
Doing away with our current legal system and replacing it with something new is not something we do overnight, but we need to start the process as soon as possible. Make a backup of the current legal databases, run some tests on France and the US, evaluate, repeat with new test cases. This is how society should be run, in slow iterations on the system that we rely on – in many ways we already do that, but the systemic knowledge of the information age has not been implemented in our models of society yet.
I think it is time.