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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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I’d guess the legal system is a powerful selection effect where plaintiffs and lawyers prefer to bring clear cases.

Plaintiffs want to bring all sorts of bonkers cases all the time, with no regard for whether they are "clear" or even able to succeed at all. Most potential plaintiffs who reach out to law firms regard lawyers as a "get me money because something bad happened" button, and their definitions of "something bad" can be...idiosyncratic.

Plaintiff-side lawyers, on the other hand, want to bring cases which will win quickly and cheaply, and for a large amount of money against a solvent deep-pocketed defendant. This is because most plaintiffs firms take a percentage of any settlement or judgment in lieu of hourly pay from plaintiffs who aren't able to really pay lawyers' high wages in the first place. Whether the win comes as a judgment or from a settlement is of no matter. Whether the matter will be "clear" to any laypeople reading any resultant decision is a tertiary concern at best.

The system itself wants parties to settle cases before having to actually hold expensive and time-intensive trials. The entire civil procedure system is designed to make trials and judicial opinions as rare as possible. As a result, the vast, vast, vast majority of legal disputes are resolved without judicial rulings.

On the rare occasions judges do tender rulings, there is a trend for the decisions to be accessible to the laity (or, if you're a critic of the trend, to pander to the mob's prejudices and/or stoke political outrage). However, most legal issues that cases turn on just aren't that interesting to most people, because they concern weird edge cases of obscure procedural or doctrinal rules (the big obvious cases all get settled because everyone knows how they'll wind up and sees no need to incur expense just to get the result everyone already knew would happen).