In the Scotland to an extent the law favours the poor and the rich but not the middle classes due to the operation of legal aid.
The rich are able to afford to pay legal fees and the poorest in society are to some degree covered by legal aid for some civil and criminal procedures. Even on a relatively modest income you can be expected to pay full legal fees.
I often see this in divorce/family cases where tyipically one party may be on a very low income or on state benefit and receiving legal aid whilst the other on a modest income is expected to meet their own legal costs.
No win no fee counters this to an extent albeit that this usually only applies to personal injury cases.
One other effect is that the poorest are often the best able to obtain legal advice on relativly minor matters from Solicitors that fee paying clients might not be prepared to pay for. Under the legal aid scheme there is a diviision between ‘Legal Aid’ which usually applies to court process and ‘Advice and Assistance’ which generally applies to meeting, discussing case, sending letters, phone calls etc.
Pro-bono isn’t such an issue with the existance of the legal aid scheme albeit there are some area’s of work not covered by the scheme that the firm I work for does for free for some existing clients who couldn’t afford to pay.
It’s not just the lawyers who win. There’s an entire multi-billion dollar economy that runs on nothing but corporate litigation. Not just lawyers, but consultants, lit support software vendors, accountants, investigators, expert witnesses and so on.
I think there are few, if any, circumstances where a corporation should have the right to sue private individuals. Even when the corporation is technically right, it still comes across as mean and petty.
Sure I do, it’s just that zingers work better as one liners. Besides, you really ought to wait until I’m six pages into a mouth-frothing rant until you start pulling the accusations of sophistry and Jeopardy-style debate rhetoric out. I mean, geez, give to a chance to start in on some really crazy shit first. Anyway, to go back to your original argument:
That’s true, but we do tend to view ourselves as a democratic and egalitarian society, when actually every attempt at making a truly egalitarian society throughout history has failed rather miserably.
In anthropological terms we’re talking about the difference between the “ideal culture” we view ourselves as and the “real culture” we actually are. Our ideal culture holds that we are an egalitarian society of laws that favor neither the rich or the poor, and that all men recieve equal justice under the law. In reality, that’s not entirely true, and despite our best efforts, it’s probably not even possible. Our ideal culture is a standard of perfection, and perfection is something we can strive to attain but will never truly achieve. That’s why I say that the fact that the law does in many ways favor the rich isn’t necessarily evidence of corruption (although it certainly can be) so much as a fact of life. The thing is, no society that ever existed ever truly lived up to the standards it held for itself in it’s ideal culture, and I think it’s too overbroad to say that every society that ever existed has been corrupt in that regard. I just think that a truly egalitarian society in which the rich hold no special privileges under the law is a ultimately unattainable goal - and one that we should nevertheless work toward.
That’s the purpose behind contingency fees - harness the greed of plaintiff-side class action lawyers to the service of the ‘poor schlub’ who is (for example) injured by some shoddy product.
Ordinarily, the poor schlub would not have the resources to pursue lengthy and expensive litigation; the class action lawyer however does, and does so on his own dime - gambling on picking up something in the order of 20% of the recovery as his fees. If the class has a lot of poor schlubs in it, that would be a worthwhile honey pot to gamble on.
The poor schlubs maybe only get 80% of their recovery, but they risk nothing, pay no upfront fees, if they don’t like it they can opt out and 80% is better than the nothing they would otherwise get.
Seems to me this goes partway to redress the balance.