Limitations And Fails Of Law System
The law is prevalent in our lives every day. Although we might not recognize it, we experience law in several different aspects of our day, both formally and informally. The law is considered as a form of formal social control, In the reading “Law and society”, Steven Vago expresses that “formal social control is characterized by (1) explicit rules of conduct, (2) planned use of sanctions to support the rules, and (3) designated officials to interpret and enforce the rules, and often make them”. Without formally functioning laws, society would live in unmitigated anarchy with no control. Daily, we experience these formal laws in several different ways. For example, when driving you follow the rules of the road which functions as formal laws. When an individual pulls up to a stop sign, obeys the speed limit and drives on the right side of the road are all ways we experience formal law. These laws are in place to deter individuals from driving erratically which could cause harm to other individuals in society. When an individual does not obey the rules of the road, it could result in a ticket from a police officer.
In my life, I have experienced formal law when being in a car accident. Last year my friends and I were driving in a snow storm, when we slipped off the road and flipped over in the car four times. While no other car was involved in the accident, four police officers showed up immediately after the crash. All seven we were taken to the police station and breathalyzed. While we all passed the breathalyzer, the driver received a $500 ticket for speeding and reckless endangerment for having too many passengers in the car. This experience with the law conveys Vago’s definition and his 3 components of formal social control. A formal rule was broken, and designated officials imposed sanctions for his wrongdoing.
Throughout college, I have taken several legal and sociology classes that have represented the law in several different aspects. I have taken classes that have shown the law in a positive sense but also in a negative sense as well. In my race and policing class the professor taught the class from the perspective that law can sometimes fail at achieving justice for individuals in society. The main notion of the class was about police brutality and how police officers can often racially profile, and be discriminatory towards minorities. Discrimination is a dysfunction of the law. Vago articulates, “These dysfunctions stem in part from the law’s conservative tendencies, the rigidity inherent in its formal structure, the restrictive aspects connected with its control functions, and the fact that certain kinds of discriminations are inherent in the law itself”.
We examined videos of officers abusing their discretion to harm and often kill minorities. In many of the cases we examined, the victim and their families received no justice through the courts to receive compensation, restitution for the damages done and closure. In many of these cases, the police officers received no repercussions or jail time as well. This displays the law in a negative sense. It expresses that while the court is intended to bring justice to the defendant, in many aspects and ways it fails to do so. In my citizen’s police academy course, they expressed the law in a more positive way. In this class, we got to work with the UMass Police Department and have hands-on experience and training with the police. This shed a positive light on the law enforcement aspect of the law. We got to listen and speak to the officers about upholding the law and enforcing the rules. In the class the police officers also showed us their training on police discretion and implicit biases, as well as talked about police brutality cases where justice has been granted to the victim. These two classes have exhibited how the law can be both positive and negative at achieving justice. In the United States the legal system employs the ideology of the common-law tradition. In the reading “The civil law tradition: an introduction to the legal systems of Europe and Latin America”, Merryman and Pérez-Perdomo express that a legal system is an “operation set of legal institutions, procedures and rules. In this sense there are one federal and fifty state legal systems in the United States…”.
The United States legal system is an adversarial system, which resolves legal issues in a court room setting for criminal and civil cases in which lawyer’s present evidence at trial to a jury, and the jury decides the fate of the defendant. Every day the media covers subjects including trials, crime and justice. High-profile cases and trials are a subject in which individuals in society find fascinating and tune into the media to watch. The media glorifies the adversary system, and allows the public with access to a glimpse of how the United States court room works. The extensive media coverage of trials affects the justice aspect of the legal system. The information provided to individuals makes it difficult to find an unbiased jury, who are not swayed by information provided to them from the news prior to the trial. This gives a negative representation of the law to the public.
In the “Chapter III: The Adversary System and Jury Trials” reading, the author says the most important aspect of a jury is the need for a passive decision-maker during trial. “The most fundamental principle of the adversary system is its insistence upon strictly separating the active function of investigating and gathering evidence and deciding the case. Often during trial juries engage in preliminary theorizing which could jeopardize the justice of a defendant. Therefore, the media’s mass coverage of criminal trial cases has a negative effect in the courtroom and on the adversary system. The law has several limitations within the criminal and civil law sphere. In the reading “Adversarial legalism: The American Way of Law”, Robert Kagan mentions several of the limits of the law, “…adversarial legalism is a markedly inefficient, complex, costly, punitive and unpredictable method of governance and dispute resolution. In consequence, the American legal system often is unjust…”
In my opinion, these are major limitations of the law. For one, the legal process is costly and a time-consuming process. Criminal trials and civil cases can take months to years to come to a resolution due to the complexity of the legal system. Another limitation is the cost of the process. To get representation for an effective lawyer are expensive to hire for criminal and civil legal cases. The more money you spend on an effective lawyer, the better your chances are at winning your case in court, and many people cannot afford a good lawyer causing them to have a court appointed lawyer for their case.
Another limitation of the law is biases and discrimination in the court room. In the United States, it is hard to find an impartial jury that will not allow their implicit biases to affect their decision making. Individuals in a jury might engage in preliminary theorizing while the evidence is presented and decide on what they believe happened before all the evidence has been presented to them. Kagan articulates, “The root of the problem…is the natural known human tendency to judge too swiftly in terms of the familiar that which is not fully known”. Placing your fate in someone else’s hands, is stressful when not knowing whether their bias will come into play when deciding. Another limitation of the law is that it is not always just. For example, the victims and their families of the Nord-Ost attack received restitution and closure, “The family of each hostage who died in the attack received 100,000 rubles (about $3,300 at the time); those who survived received 50,000 rubles (half as much). For those who died, Moscow also provided a coffin and a funeral. For those in the cast and crew of the musical, Moscow paid their salaries…”. The victims also received no explanation to the questions they had about what happened, what the gas was and what went wrong. Overall, these limitations are the most prominent and evident within the law.
