Abstract

If someone assaults you, should they get a milder penalty if they are rich than if they are poor? We wouldn't dream of passing a law that formalized such an arrangement. But the design of our legal systems in the US, UK, and elsewhere, which permits people with sufficient money to pay for better lawyers, means that wealth often does make a difference to legal outcomes. Justice, then, depends not only on the substance of the laws we pass, but on the design of the system that administers and enforces them. Philosophers and legal theorists, however, have paid relatively little attention to what justice demands of the general design and structure of the legal system. Equal Justice argues among other things that market principles should not determine access to legal resources. If, for example, a large corporation sues a small startup, either the corporation has to use a law firm of the quality that the startup can afford or--which would be preferable, given the corporation's in-house lawyers--the startup would be given a subsidy to afford a top firm. The author builds on this core idea of equal access to resources to work out how the court system and the legal profession should be structured in order to ensure a generally just legal system.