A Progressive on the Prairie

You don’t have to love the system to hate J.A.I.L.

Even those who think there’s too much litigation in society recognize that Amendment E isn’t the solution. Overlawyered.com is a widely respected web site that, in its own words, “explores an American legal system that too often turns litigation into a weapon against guilty and innocent alike, erodes individual responsibility, rewards sharp practice, enriches its participants at the public’s expense, and resists even modest efforts at reform and accountability.”

Yet here’s what Ted Frank of that site had to say about Amendment E:

Let’s be clear: one can take the position that there needs to be more judicial accountability and that too many judges overstep their bounds, and still think that Amendment E — the likely-unconstitutional South Dakota ballot proposal to end civil immunity for judges and jurors and establish an unanswerable “special grand jury” to oversee these things — is positively insane cuckoo bonkers.

I take it he doesn’t mean “positively insane cuckoo bonkers” in a good way.

All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified.

Thomas Henry Huxley, “On the Study of Biology“