Many people in the blawgosphere are surprised to learn of my interest in Seth Godin, given my general antipathy toward marketing.  But his way of seeing things gives me pause, and makes me rethink my way of seeing things.  Things that makes us think are good, and Seth makes me think.  It’s not that I necessarily agree, or that his advice applies as well to my world as to his, but he still makes me think.

One of Seth’s recent posts really had me going for a while,  The premise is that “things are broken” because you think they are broken.  It doesn’t matter what someone else thinks.  It doesn’t matter whether there is a good reason for them to be the way they are, and it surely doesn’t matter whether there is no reason for them to be the way they are.  Most importantly, it doesn’t matter that someone else doesn’t care or doesn’t think it’s a big deal.  If they are broken to you, then they are broken.

The post is comprised of a video of one of Seth’s lectures, and Seth provides a list of reasons why things are broken, and a bunch of examples of things he thinks are broken.  Some are quite funny and make his point well, while others don’t strike me as broken at all.  But then, that’s his point.  It doesn’t matter if I agree that they are broken, as it’s enough that he thinks so.

Why do I raise this?  It’s quite possible that there is nothing more widely perceived as broken, and simultaneously more deeply stuck in its ways, than the criminal law.  The only thing coming even close is civil law.  Notice a commonality between the two?

Lawyers, judges and legislators find it easy to explain why this mass perception is wrong, and shrug off the public’s belief that our legal system is broken.  We need our rules, they say.  It must be done this way.  This is the product of hundreds of years of development of the law, and it’s the best system ever devised.  We know this because we repeat it with great regularity.

I am not suggesting that this has anything to do with new technologies, which I doubt will cause anywhere near the seismic shift that its advocates claim.  In fact, I think this is far more fundamental, utterly unrelated to the type of minituae that lawyers tend to focus on and debate.  On our best day, the legal system cannot seem to satisfy the needs of our society to deliver a prompt, inexpensive and just result.

My posts are regularly filled with stories of injustice, some of which are later corrected.  Consider some of the regular fodder and say with a straight face that we’re doing a bang up job of delivering justice.  Tell it to the child denied her parent.  Tell it to the paraplegic beaten for not jumping upon demand fast enough.  Sure, we have a million excuses/explanations (lawyers are particularly good at coming up with excuses), but if you’re not vested in rationalizing away failures, it’s just plain, old broken.

And just so you know, it doesn’t matter if you disagree.  It’s broken, because that’s what non-lawyers (and some lawyers as well) think.  And that’s the point.