Yeah, that's trivial. But law has so many edge cases and seemingly it always favor either powerful or wealthy individuals.
Plus, poor people cannot afford the litigation costs...
Plus, poor people cannot afford the litigation costs...
- Plutarch
Reality is in favor of the powerful and wealthy. It's practically a tautological statement that powerful people are more powerful than those who are not.
Poor people do have the option of seeking pro bono, contingency (lawyers paid from winnings or settlements), or other means, but they will still not have things like daycare / nanny for children, free time (still need to work to pay bills while trial is pending), prepared meals, staff to handle shopping / laundry / cleaning, or a billion other things that make the stress of going through the court system easier to bear.
You could probably say goodbye to pro bono or contingency work if you also had to prove you have the money to pay legal fees before you could go to court.
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread."
-- Anatole France
It’s not that lawyers told me there wasn’t a case. Instead, they said it was “too complicated.” One attorney spent a week supposedly weighing my meticulously prepared case, only to dismiss it with a curt email: “Regrettably, we have too many other cases to manage additional workloads at this time.” After that, my emails went unanswered, my pleas seemingly silenced by convenience.
Apparently, lawyers today prefer the ripest, lowest hanging fruit, the easy cases promising easy profits. In our society, drowning in incompetence, there’s no shortage of simpler, safer bets. Yet, you’d think there would still be at least a few brave souls seeking justice, not only easy money, who would choose righteousness over profit, integrity over convenience. But I learned the hard way that righteousness rarely outweighs the bottom line.
I handed them an almost complete case, indexed, transcribed, painstakingly timestamped. They didn’t even bother to read it. Beyond the injustice, what wounds me most deeply is the realization that my father’s profound decency, the quiet dignity and unwavering ethics that defined his life, ultimately meant nothing in a system indifferent to such virtues. His goodness didn’t offer him protection or redemption in death. Perhaps it was naive to believe that it ever could.
This realization doesn’t just hurt, it isolates, minimizes, and disillusions. It deepens the bitterness of loss. Forgive me for venting my frustration this way, but it’s all I have left.
I’m sorry, Dad. I truly tried. Turns out, you were right about lawyers, too. I’m writing this with just a few weeks remaining in the statute of limitations. It doesn’t have to be like this, but all indications are that decency simply costs too much for those in power.