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Comment by rokkamokka | Hacker News Reader

A hundred million identical court cases might not be too good for the legal system

1. Why should harming a million people identically reduce their right to a fair legal evaluation and possibly compensation for damages? <-- maybe it makes sense for large corporations to carry insurance to pay for the potentially massive legal costs they could impose on governments? 2. Shouldn't we be able to quickly resolve these cases assuming there are no substantially different pieces of evidence?

> 1. Why should harming a million people identically reduce their right to a fair legal evaluation and possibly compensation for damages?

It doesn’t. You can almost[1] always opt out of class action lawsuits to pursue your own suit. This would be expensive and unwise for most people, but you have right.

[1] There are rare exceptions.

Agreed. Naturally, the solution is to get meta to compensate for the actual and cumulative damage they've done to mankind. Then plaintiffs might actually benefit.

This is humanity vs Mark Zuckerberg.

Isn't that trivially fixed by raising court costs (that should go to whoever loses the suit) to cover the cost of judges, jury, admin expenses etc? I don't get the impression that this would make the justice system that much more prohibitively expensive than it already is, and would allow the legal system to scale to the case load

No, because the limitation is not money. More money does not magically make the humans in the profession be able to handle higher case-loads, nor magically produce new lawyers and judges. The bottleneck is time that each case takes to be properly and thoroughly adjudicated, and neither "more money" nor "more people" can accelerate that. While it's certainly correct to say that more staff could handle a larger number of cases, a. more staff = more cases, but more money doesn't speed up those cases, so there's still not really anything to be gained in terms of efficiency by increasing individual case costs. And b. if the solution was as simple as "hire more judges", it would have happened already.

Courts aren't lacking in budget to hire more people. They're lacking in people available to hire, with the specific expertise that they need to fill any gaps. The legal profession, at least in the US, consistently has some of the lowest unemployment rates across the board. Unlike over here in the tech sector, the scarcity is in available talent, rather than available jobs.

In the case of "a hundred million identical cases" handling more concurrent cases would be enough, we don't need to speed up the individual cases.

Getting the right people might be an issue. But the tech sector is actually a great example of how to do that. The tech sector has also grown beyond what it could sustain with just people who are in it for the love of tech, and how it managed to do that would be a great case study. A good work-live balance, consistently high salaries and great outreach were certainly among the contributing factors. All of which boil down to throwing money at the problem in a smart way

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