Курсовая работа: Legal system

Yes, there are appeals courts, but these are just more judges, who are often friends with the lower court judge who originally sold you out. The appeals judges tend to go along with the lower court judge, unless you have suddenly acquired some politically powerful backing on your side.

Americans love to talk about "taking it all the way to the Supreme Court!", but this is a nearly empty hope. The U.S. Supreme Court simply refuses to consider most cases that are presented to it.

When the USA President talks about "advancing the cause of freedom", he basically means freedom for big corporations to do business. He's not really talking about actual personal freedom for real people. But he grins when he talks about "freedom" because it's a good word of salesmanship, people hear him and some of them can be duped into believing that America cares about personal or political freedom.

Hollywood movies and American television are a major element of political myth-making. Around the world, people derive an image of America, and its legal system, from these fictional creations on film. America's propaganda about having "the greatest legal system in the world" is one of those phony stories that Hollywood is helping to sell.

It is also a myth sustained by the few trials about which there is a lot of publicity, like with the celebrity trials of Martha Stewart or Michael Jackson. Judges behave very differently when the cameras are rolling, or the media is reporting everything that goes on, and millions of dollars are being spent on lawyers. But in the 98 percent of court activity that does not have big media coverage, the judges of America provide a bizarre sideshow of horror.

In the Hollywood version, the judges in American courts are like kind uncles, smiling and being wise and calmly dispensing justice. But in reality, American judges sometimes scream at people like disturbed perverts, and show off their bribed corruption right there in the courtroom. Sometimes judges engage in flagrant extortion, where you have to agree to pay money to the judge's lawyer friends as the price to stay out of jail. It is really that bad. You can find no end of documented horror about American judges behaving like criminal lunatics, and it is getting worse all the time.

It is just getting worse and worse in America's legal system. For some years now, the USA judges and lawyers have gotten used to denying people justice, to the great flow of bribery money, and even to committing felony crimes in broad daylight and getting away with it. It just keeps on escalating. Though a social explosion is lurking beneath the surface - with judges starting to get murdered, and people lighting courthouses ablaze - the people who run America are letting the current system chug along as it is, justice be damned, and to hell with the people who seem to have no way to fight back..

It can't go on like this forever, but it may get a lot worse first, despite the fair internet visibility on documented American legal corruption. One should note a brave and promising grass-roots attempt at judicial reform in the USA called, which attempts to place onto American ballots, a referendum for a new procedure to give citizens a real right of redress against corrupt judges. It is a wonderful and beautiful idea that deserves success, and will help transform America if it moves forward.

America, indeed, does not have the rule of law at all. Instead, it is just the rule of lawyers, lawyers who crave money and power.

CONCLUSION

There was a time, long ago, in the USA when lawyers were illegal. All persons in court had to represent themselves and have a decent grasp of the law.

This had several effects:

1. It kept legal action short. You could only keep a case going as long as you could afford to be gone.

2. It kept the law simple. When everyone is forced to know the law you don't end up with the million page monster that USA current laws are. This is, I think, the biggest bonus. How can you keep the law when you don't even know the law? It became a big problem currently in the USA, and corrupted or greed lawyers and judges make money on it.

But at the same time if you kill the lawyers then the criminalities will be in an even better place than before. One problem with the current legal system is that it's believed that two lawyers, both fighting hard for their clients, can after much muckraking and slander finally uncover the truth and find justice. And I come back to the same question: what defines justice? How can a lawyer knowingly fight on behalf of guilty man and demand for his client what is not justice? What defines justice? Is it money?

As one can notice there are a lot of problems in the modern American legal system: corruption, untruly revenues and often unequal access of citizens to the judgment. The system is sophisticated and uncontrolled.

Analyzed all the previous information I can state with very much confidence that American legal system needs reforms in the area of organization.

LITERATURE

1.  Acheson, Patricia C., Our Federal Government, How It Works, Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1984.

2.  Burke, Thomas F. Lawyers, Lawsuits and Legal Rights. California, 2002

3.  Carp, Robert A., Stidham, Ronald, Judicial Process in America, Congressional Quarterly Inc., Washington, D.C., 1993.

4.  Curran, Christopher (1993), ‘The American Experience with Self-Regulation in the Medical and Legal Professions’. Regulation of Professions, Antwerpen, Maklu, 47-87

5.  Gillers, Stephen; Simon, Roy D. Regulation of Lawyers: Statutes and Standards. New York, 2001

6.  Hazard, Geoffrey C. Jr.; Rhode, Deborah L. The Legal Profession: Responsibility And Regulation Westbury, 1994

7.  Lee, Katherine J., Courts & Judges, How They Work, Halt, Inc., 1987.

8.  M. Thornton, Dissonance and Distrust Women in the Legal Profession (1996)

9.  Morgan, Thomas D.; Rotunda, Ronald D. Problems and Materials on Professional Responsibility New York, 1995

10.  Rhode, Deborah L. In the Interests of Justice- Reforming the Legal Profession . USA, 2000

11.  Vago, Steven Law and Society. St.Louis, 2000

12.  Wasby, Stephen L., The Supreme Court in the Federal Judicial System, Nelson-Hall Publishers, Chicago, 4th ed. 1996.

[1] from the preamble to Supreme Court Rule 4