McLibel Case
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
>McDonald's spent several million pounds, while Steel and Morris spent £30,000; this disparity in funds meant Steel and Morris were not able to call all the witnesses they wanted, especially witnesses from South America who were intended to support their claims about McDonald's activities in that continent's rainforests.
It's pretty galling that the justice system, which is a public tool, being gamed in this way by a party with vastly greater assets. It's a bit tricky to see exactly how to fix this, since you don't really want to just give each side a court-appointed lawyer: you really should get to pick your own lawyer. But what to do about the fact that you might want to pick an expensive lawyer?
It seems to me that one compromise would be to recognize that you can legitimately have a strong interest in the case having a just outcome, and thus want to spend more money fighting it, while at the same time not allowing one side to outspend the other.
One way to achieve this would be requiring that each side can only pay into a common pool of money, which is then split equally between the defence and prosecution.
The practical difficulty in implementing this is that a large company (e.g. McDonalds) will have in-house counsel who are not just hired for solely this case, and it would be hard to dis-entangle just how much of their salary should be counted as being for this particular case.
Put a hard limit on the amount of money that is allowed to be spent, and that limit is based on how much the less wealthy can spend.
If the more wealthy wants to spend more, they can give money to the other side so they can spend equally huge amounts.
“If the more wealthy wants to spend more, they can give money to the other side so they can spend equally huge amounts.”
What was wrong with this comment?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V58kK4r26yk
Interesting aside: one of the pro bono lawyers was Keir Starmer, now Sir Keir Starmer who went on to become Director of Public Prosecutions, before entering politics, and recently elected Leader of Her Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition. By all accounts he's showing up our utterly useless PM for the incompetent fool he is.
To be fair, that's not a plus point for Starmer since that's the lowest of low bars. I'd expect anyone capable of even the basest level of critical thinking and fact checking to wipe the floor with Johnson (and most of the Tory party.)
Can you expand on what that means?
In my understanding, courts don't presumptively "already know" anything at all, except law and precedent. The whole point of a suit is that two parties are contesting knowledge, interpretation, or law. Even if a court's judge(s) suppose(s) something to be true, isn't the whole point that the defendent claims it to be false and is therefore entitled to a hearing?
Not OP, but the way I understood it was that the court already holds hard evidence confirming the statements to be undoubtedly true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation_Act_2013
https://services.parliament.uk/bills/2012-13/defamation.html
« In the course of the UK undercover policing relationships scandal it was revealed that one of the authors of the "McLibel leaflet" was Bob Lambert, an undercover police officer who infiltrated London Greenpeace; John Dines, another undercover officer, was also Helen Steel's partner for two years. »
What an unbelievably shitty thing to do. Some people have no heart.
0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Lambert_(undercover_poli...
Who are you going to stop, McDonalds? Reddit's /u/blazeit420? You don't know who he is. And a ban will just result in /u/cockscrew69 picking up the ball.
Brilliant :D