When I began law school, one of my professors spoke to the student body, and described our legal system as a replacement for the brutality which can come from competition for rights and resources. Absent an active and accessible judiciary, aggrieved parties are relegated to "self help" to resolve disputes. What sort of help is available to that person? If they have the physical strength to accomplish it, the self help involves physically forcing the opponent to comply.
When modern-day litigants wait months or years for resolution of their disputes, they may wish to return to the days of clubs and pistols. However, the Rule of Law has several distinct advantages: it places power in the hands of the less powerful, it grants ultimate judgments to a neutral party, it allows non-parties (the rest of the world) the peace of mind to know that they won't be caught in the cross fire, and it lets the parties know that they can be heard.
How is this accomplished? By replacing weapons with facts, might with precedent, and actions with arguments. Facts are the tools with which the parties pitch battle in modern society, and the law can be used as both a sword and a shield in these fights. And though sometimes the system fails, and the wrong party prevails (and sometimes the system works and the correct party prevails), usually the courts come down somewhere in the middle depending on the shade of grey.
To the outside world, the courts can seem to be a behemoth pumping out justice at a snail's pace. From an employer's perspective, plaintiff's seem to be clogging the courts with frivolous cases just to get a big payoff. While both the court and plaintiffs (and defendants too, for that matter) sometimes act as barriers to justice, on the whole the system works better than the alternative it was designed to replace -- better to lose your shirt than your eye or your head!
One of the regular topics I'll write about is why the system, despite its flaws, functions well for us its patrons.
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