E-M8 Entrepreneurial Management for Eternal Mission

When you hear expressions like Judges should not legislate from the bench, you know you are in a contry with a common law system. Only a few countries have it, since it is more cumbersome. Yet, the very fact that our judges can legislate from the bench makes it vastly superior to the French based civil legal system. We have gotten away from this to a large degree with our criminal law, but at least our lawyers are trained to think in the way of Juris, which we will discuss in a minute.

The difference: In Civil system the judge looks through the rule book and applies the rule to each case. In Common law system things are much more complicated, the judge has the responsibility of interpreting what other judges have decided in the past for similar cases, coming up with a solution based on that and on the current dynamics as well as the specifics of the case and then writing an opinion that will influence future court decisions.

Why all this complexity? Simply because we are a country where Juris is more important than Lex. And we are better off for it.

Juris is the search for justice, it is the fundamental belief that there is a natural (or God made) principles of living that exist in this world that we need to discover and apply to each particular case, rather than assume that decisions can simply be made by a congress issued rule book.

Lex is the letter of the law, it is a set of rules with the specific consequences listed for violating them. Juris on the other hand is the spirit of the law that causes us to ask the question what is the wisest decision in each case.

Unfortunately, we often live our life in the lex mode, just mindlessly following the rules. Juris challenges that. It asks the question: “What actions will produce the greatest long term benefit for society?” or “What is the most equitable way to resolve a particular conflict?” These are questions that are wasted on Civil Law systems that just apply cold hard rules of the law.

Lex is about Right and Wrong, whereas Juris holds up Wisdom as its ideal.

 While we often are not very wise and our system is more prone to the influence of bad judges, at its core, our legal system pursues a better goal. Even if we do a lousy job pursuing wisdom, we are better off than if we did a great job pursuing right and wrong.

Yes, our system is cumbersome, yes there is lots of room for improvement, yes we have more lawyers per capita than just about anywhere else in the world. And yet we have a  better system. Not a more efficient system, not a well functioning system but a system that pursues better goals.

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