Great article! I just wanted to point out that open source intelligence is nowadays doing interesting investigations, though beings separate from the formal investigative institutions. Take MH17 {the plane shot down over Donbass back in 2014) and how their findings were (IIRC) admitted as evidence in the court. It's not a replacement for the court, but maybe a food for thought and a hint of what's coming.
Wait, so what's the deal with small-claims court? My understanding is that it was created due to the usual court system being too expensive and inconvenient. But it seems like people don't really use it much so it's not really serving its purpose anymore? What happened there? Why isn't it working?
(I realize this is off your main point, but it's something I'm pretty confused about...)
Sarah, not directly on topic, but I think that, partly, dispute resolution shifted from the public to private sphere. From courts to insurance companies.
Nationally, disputes are also handled on the insurance level. This can be done with mediators, arbitrators, or directly with insurance claim's adjuster. Per this source, there are 132,000 insurance adjusters in the United States. https://www.zippia.com/claims-adjuster-jobs/demographics/
Given that an adjuster is probably handling 100+ cases a year, conservatively, that's 13.2 million disputes resolved in the private sector every year.
That aside, we would love to feature your “court system” at The Lianeon Project once it is hashed out.
Certainly a big factor is that claims have to be small, <10K or so. That’s probably small enough that a large proportion of people with the executive function, social status, etc to think of going to court can’t be bothered.
That's not really an answer such as a restatement of the question. If the entire point of small-claims court was to make it easy enough to be worth bothering even in that case, and the question is "why is it presently not succeeding at that goal", then saying "because it's too much trouble" isn't an answer. *Why* is it too much trouble? In particular I'm assuming it didn't *use* to be much trouble, so if that's the case, what changed? (I suppose inflation might be part of the answer, but is that the *whole* answer?) Note that people *do* still use other mechanisms, that they consider less trouble, to settle such disputes (e.g., for small debts there is the use of collections agencies), so there is *some* level of easy-enough that will people will resort to for small claims; the question then is why is small-claims court failing to meet that bar.
Yes, you’re right. The contrast with collection agencies is really apt, since court judgments are more powerful than private collections—they can lead to garnishing wages and placing liens on real estate. Looking into it more, I think the biggest issue is that you have to represent yourself in small claims court and show up physically. For a corporation, “yourself” means an employee, officer, or director, but emphatically *not* somebody whose job it is to represent the corporation in court, or apparently any attorney at all, at least in California. And if your defendant is out of state, you have to sue where they live. Even if you win, it’s on you to get writs of execution and get the sheriff to help get your money. And the judgment may not even go in the defendant’s credit!
It seems clear that no big corporation is going to be flying people around the country to make small claims cases incidentally to their main job duties, so that pretty much explains why this never really happens for credit card and medical debts. Small claims is really designed for humans to sue other nearby humans, which is probably a much smaller proportion of torts than it used to be. Much better to give a little more money to a collection agency and forget about it.
Interesting! I was talking just about California, didn’t know there was so much variation. That seems wildly inconsistent with the whole idea of small claims to me, since that means it’s very expensive for a corporate person to use small claims in NJ, but, shrug.
Well now I'm dying for the follow up. How can we build this thing we so need? The broad, nearly universal collapse of public trust in institutions has introduced an escalating cultural chaos that could wreck literally everything. In other words, I agree with you, top to bottom. I'm impressed by your measured description of the problem. I tend to have a lot of exclamation points in my head around topics like these.
All of which is to say, again, I'll eagerly await your ideas about how to move forward and build the kinds of institutions we so desperately need.
>Canonicity isn’t an impossible dream. Wikipedia is the canonical source on most factual topics. If two people have a disagreement about the kind of fact you might find on Wikipedia, they can generally say “let’s look it up and see what Wiki says.” Wikipedia has a justified reputation, across communities and ideologies, for being largely accurate and for having a “neutral point of view.” As a Schelling point for fact-checking, Wikipedia is clearly the best thing around — it’s the highest-quality source that most people know about, and most of us can agree to trust it most of the time.
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL
Edit: Decided to continue reading, against my better judgment (mistake #1 on my part, but at least I'm willing to own up to it).
>Emily Oster’s call for a “pandemic amnesty” is right that endless partisan recriminations are undesirable and we need some kind of compassionate way to move on from the pandemic. Maybe, indeed, we want something like “amnesty” in the sense of choosing not to punish anyone for what they did during the pandemic.
Super great piece, thanks for writing it! Super curious to hear your follow ups, it seems like several questions might be implied in some of this:
1. Why people (more specifically, disputing parties) need *commonly* trusted arbiters to cohere/cooperate/coordinate/resolve--and the (seemingly dysfunctional) state of that is today for various disputes/parties
2. What does it take (e.g. what kinds of economic, cultural, social capital) to run a functioning arbitration/disrupte-resolution institution, especially ones that start involving complex fact-finding, technical or ethical judgment? Why are the current ones not functioning up to expectations, and is it feasible for them to cover their entire scopes? (E.g. investigating all possible health risks / pollutants at the rate that such issues arise?)
3. What does it take to build *trust* in a complex technical arbiter, on behalf of everybody else who by construction is not going to be an expert with the time/resources/etc. to try to independently verify / appeal the arbiter?
Super curious to hear if any of these come up in the course of your follow ups. Very exciting!
Great article! I just wanted to point out that open source intelligence is nowadays doing interesting investigations, though beings separate from the formal investigative institutions. Take MH17 {the plane shot down over Donbass back in 2014) and how their findings were (IIRC) admitted as evidence in the court. It's not a replacement for the court, but maybe a food for thought and a hint of what's coming.
Wait, so what's the deal with small-claims court? My understanding is that it was created due to the usual court system being too expensive and inconvenient. But it seems like people don't really use it much so it's not really serving its purpose anymore? What happened there? Why isn't it working?
(I realize this is off your main point, but it's something I'm pretty confused about...)
I don't know!
This article says NYC small claims court sees about 18,000 cases a year https://www.pressconnects.com/story/money/consumer-outlook/2018/10/12/small-claims-court-new-york-how/1334808002/ which sounds like a lot but is still just 0.002 cases per capita, way below the historical per-capita litigation rates.
Sarah, not directly on topic, but I think that, partly, dispute resolution shifted from the public to private sphere. From courts to insurance companies.
Nationally, disputes are also handled on the insurance level. This can be done with mediators, arbitrators, or directly with insurance claim's adjuster. Per this source, there are 132,000 insurance adjusters in the United States. https://www.zippia.com/claims-adjuster-jobs/demographics/
Given that an adjuster is probably handling 100+ cases a year, conservatively, that's 13.2 million disputes resolved in the private sector every year.
That aside, we would love to feature your “court system” at The Lianeon Project once it is hashed out.
Certainly a big factor is that claims have to be small, <10K or so. That’s probably small enough that a large proportion of people with the executive function, social status, etc to think of going to court can’t be bothered.
That's not really an answer such as a restatement of the question. If the entire point of small-claims court was to make it easy enough to be worth bothering even in that case, and the question is "why is it presently not succeeding at that goal", then saying "because it's too much trouble" isn't an answer. *Why* is it too much trouble? In particular I'm assuming it didn't *use* to be much trouble, so if that's the case, what changed? (I suppose inflation might be part of the answer, but is that the *whole* answer?) Note that people *do* still use other mechanisms, that they consider less trouble, to settle such disputes (e.g., for small debts there is the use of collections agencies), so there is *some* level of easy-enough that will people will resort to for small claims; the question then is why is small-claims court failing to meet that bar.
Yes, you’re right. The contrast with collection agencies is really apt, since court judgments are more powerful than private collections—they can lead to garnishing wages and placing liens on real estate. Looking into it more, I think the biggest issue is that you have to represent yourself in small claims court and show up physically. For a corporation, “yourself” means an employee, officer, or director, but emphatically *not* somebody whose job it is to represent the corporation in court, or apparently any attorney at all, at least in California. And if your defendant is out of state, you have to sue where they live. Even if you win, it’s on you to get writs of execution and get the sheriff to help get your money. And the judgment may not even go in the defendant’s credit!
It seems clear that no big corporation is going to be flying people around the country to make small claims cases incidentally to their main job duties, so that pretty much explains why this never really happens for credit card and medical debts. Small claims is really designed for humans to sue other nearby humans, which is probably a much smaller proportion of torts than it used to be. Much better to give a little more money to a collection agency and forget about it.
In New Jersey, a corporation or LLC *must* be represented by a lawyer in small claims court.
Interesting! I was talking just about California, didn’t know there was so much variation. That seems wildly inconsistent with the whole idea of small claims to me, since that means it’s very expensive for a corporate person to use small claims in NJ, but, shrug.
Well now I'm dying for the follow up. How can we build this thing we so need? The broad, nearly universal collapse of public trust in institutions has introduced an escalating cultural chaos that could wreck literally everything. In other words, I agree with you, top to bottom. I'm impressed by your measured description of the problem. I tend to have a lot of exclamation points in my head around topics like these.
All of which is to say, again, I'll eagerly await your ideas about how to move forward and build the kinds of institutions we so desperately need.
>Canonicity isn’t an impossible dream. Wikipedia is the canonical source on most factual topics. If two people have a disagreement about the kind of fact you might find on Wikipedia, they can generally say “let’s look it up and see what Wiki says.” Wikipedia has a justified reputation, across communities and ideologies, for being largely accurate and for having a “neutral point of view.” As a Schelling point for fact-checking, Wikipedia is clearly the best thing around — it’s the highest-quality source that most people know about, and most of us can agree to trust it most of the time.
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL
Edit: Decided to continue reading, against my better judgment (mistake #1 on my part, but at least I'm willing to own up to it).
>Emily Oster’s call for a “pandemic amnesty” is right that endless partisan recriminations are undesirable and we need some kind of compassionate way to move on from the pandemic. Maybe, indeed, we want something like “amnesty” in the sense of choosing not to punish anyone for what they did during the pandemic.
This deserves a response:
LOLOLOLOLOLOL
Super great piece, thanks for writing it! Super curious to hear your follow ups, it seems like several questions might be implied in some of this:
1. Why people (more specifically, disputing parties) need *commonly* trusted arbiters to cohere/cooperate/coordinate/resolve--and the (seemingly dysfunctional) state of that is today for various disputes/parties
2. What does it take (e.g. what kinds of economic, cultural, social capital) to run a functioning arbitration/disrupte-resolution institution, especially ones that start involving complex fact-finding, technical or ethical judgment? Why are the current ones not functioning up to expectations, and is it feasible for them to cover their entire scopes? (E.g. investigating all possible health risks / pollutants at the rate that such issues arise?)
3. What does it take to build *trust* in a complex technical arbiter, on behalf of everybody else who by construction is not going to be an expert with the time/resources/etc. to try to independently verify / appeal the arbiter?
Super curious to hear if any of these come up in the course of your follow ups. Very exciting!