Just thinking off the top of my head here, but would you necessarily need lawyers, or could you require that members of society participate in dispute resolution processes? Perhaps some mandatory civil service for a portion of each year - combined with a prohibition against specializing ONLY in dispute resolution for fee. Maybe trades could have their own unions/guilds to manage disputes and relations within their trade and with others…
After all, they’d only need one law, right? Don’t be a jerk!
First, the whole point of having legal experts is that they have more skill in the relevant area of law than you do. If you’re just dragging people in off the street, half the time you’re going to get someone less competent than you are. And if everyone was skilled enough to not be a liability, you wouldn’t need lawyers in the first place.
Second, the lawyer must be sufficiently motivated to use those skills. Conscripting people is not the best way of making people care about their work.
All you’d be doing is wasting a whole lot of otherwise valuable time, to make the colony’s legal system worse off.
And once you train people to be competent in Legal System “B”, you’ve created specialists. You don’t necessarily have to call them lawyers, but that’s what you’ll have.
The answer is that you will need lawyers once the colony is big enough not to be ruled by what amounts to military-style discipline.
Small, hazardous expeditions are typically ruled by some pre-existing code under which discipline is handled by some sort of leader, whether elected or not. The leader often acts as judge and jury for any disputes whether civil or criminal in nature (even pirates, no lovers of the laws, traditionally had a “code”, for spiltting up the loot!) The leader’s word is law - unless he messess up so much that he’s replaced - by election, by a mutiny, or by a superior authority (say, on the home planet).
The reason is clear enough - an expedition doesn’t have the time or resources for extensive procedures. Decisions must be made on the spot and quickly.
Once the colony is well established though, this sort of rule by fiat may no longer be acceptable, at which point lawyers would be necessary.
Not at all. Unless the colony’s lawmakers were being deliberately contrary the two legal systems will share a lot of similarities, because there is no benefit to not using existing law as a basis where you can.
I’m going to go with a very short learning curve. Any system where the the lawyer is paid for by the party is going to see the lawyers adjust very quickly to slanting the new rules in his/her client’s favor quickly. Laws change all the time so lawyers are used to this. The basic presumptions and duties do not change often, but adjusting would be no different than for other law changes.
I would think that if an engineer can cope with being sent from Planet A (Earth) to Planet B and not be useless, a lawyer can learn to deal with a different legal system.
Consider the colonization of America by the English. Lawyers, as such, were not sent on the early ships; the colonial governors held virtually autocratic powers and decided all disputes. The development of civil society and the growth in population led to the establishment of courts of law, and eventually lawyers both came from England or were admitted to practice (a very informal process in those days) from among the colonial population. The bigger the population, the more expansive the economy, the greater the need for lawyers. An impartial and efficient legal system is an important part of any healthy economy, so that those who do business can be confident their otherwise-unresolvable disputes will be fairly decided.
Perhaps. The lawyers I know actually spend most of their time doing what is essentially a fancy version of mediation. I can imagine that if you are colonizing space, you are going to need people who are adept at dispute resolution and settling minor conflicts equitably. I personally don’t see lawyers as the evil vultures most people seem to think they are. IME they do help keep things ordered.
I’m not so sure about that. As a lawyer, I’m very aware that however well-intentioned, just about every lawyer is interested in his personal income. And one way to maintain and increase that is to support a system in which lawyers are needed for more and more services. I’m not sure how necessary that is - especially in a nascent society.
Isn’t it the case that in England private citizens used to serve as magistrates and such? And it was not solely lawyers who ratified the US Constitution. I think lawyers turn a very tidy profit by convincing people that there are vast areas of transactions and dispute resolution that only they are qualified to handle. Even if a society needs some lawyere, I think they could easily get along with substantially fewer than we currently enjoy.
I don’t know about that. If regular public service is a part of the culture, I’m not sure people would question it. And citizen X would want to participate meaningfully, in the hopes that his fellow citizens would act likewise in situations involving citizen X’s personal interests.
I wouldn’t consider that to be a reason to “need” lawyers - if anything, it’s just a reason to dump corrupt lawmakers out the airlock. The roles of a lawyer that I feel justify their presence are to provide legal advice to their client or to act as their representative, if and only if client feels they need the help. Your suggestion requires that everyone be sufficiently skilled to act as a lawyer, in which case there aren’t any clients that need the help.
I would question it. Even if you ignore any question of freedom it’s an inefficient system, forcing both lawyers and non-lawyers to do work they aren’t good at instead of letting them specialise.
A colony created now wouldn’t necessarily need “knowledge workers” on site. Communication channels could handle this. Even much of the engineering wouldn’t have to be on site.
A trial could be conducted via video link with just an acting baliff on site. Depending on the distance, time lag would be annoying.
