DELAYS HAVE DANGEROUS ENDS - DEFER NO TIME
“Justice delayed is justice denied,” a look at “delay” over the ages, research paper on this very topic across many countries.
The verse written out for easier viewing.
DELAYS HAVE DANGEROUS ENDS - DEFER NO TIME
Democracy is a sitting duck, we fear, to Trump’s court delay tactics,
Even though I want to believe regardless of what - he can’t ever win,
Life-crippling anxiety is what he is brought upon the earnest thinkers,
And we preoccupy ourselves in whatever manner we are forced into,
Yes - democracy is on the line, this is difficult to totally comprehend,
So we try to do what most of us can to sound the alarm to the sleeping.
How so often we’ve heard justice delayed is justice denied,
And we have a common criminal doing all he can to stay out of jail,
Various thoughts might come to him, regardless he must be thwarted,
Each citizen who knows the actual game, with no bullshit, must prevail.
Democracy sounds too much like Democrat for some folks to understand,
And the painfully disinformed keep rowing our boat toward the waterfall,
Nothing can be done for a good share, we must convince the rational,
Government, of any value, is hanging by a hair of a thread in these times,
Each of us with anxiety knowing it’s primarily up to our voting,
Remembering the past few elections where Trump only failed,
Oh yes we who pay attention know the stakes in America’s future,
Understand that the fox is only eyeing the chickens with his time,
Somehow we must be only victorious in the coming election.
Every day that goes by, will he finally find savior from a Putin,
Now, hopefully our security forces are watching Trump like a hawk,
Despite his millions for legal council can he stall forever,
So we can only pay attention to this dude and understand his plight.
- “To delay is injustice.” — Jean de la Bruyere.*
Democracy is our crate of new born chicks being released,
Each of us who gets it and gives a shi* must do whatever we can,
Fascism is not some abstract thought - it’s right here today,
Every word I tap out might just help, perhaps I’m deluding myself,
Realize that Trump knows the courts, one of the few things he does.
Nations have their tests, we can decide that this time is such,
Oh yes, it would be easier if our courts were less forgiving, but then?
Trump is manipulating things as much as he possibly can now,
Indeed it may only be his lawyers running the show in these days,
Maybe giant-sized safeguards might come about through this test,
Each legal battle might continue to go on out of our newsfeed.
“Defer no time, delays have dangerous ends.”
— Shakespeare.
William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
*Jean de La Bruyère (16 August 1645 – 11 May 1696) was a French philosopher and moralist, who was noted for his satire. When La Bruyère's Caractères appeared in 1688, Nicolas de Malezieu predicted at once, that it would bring "bien des lecteurs et bien des ennemis" (many readers and many enemies). That proved to be true.
“Meet the disorder in the outset, the medicine may be too late, when the disease has gained ground through delay.”
— Ovid
Publius Ovidius Naso (20 March 43 BC – AD 17/18), known in English as Ovid, was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature. The Imperial scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the Latin love elegists. Although Ovid enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime, the emperor Augustus exiled him to Tomis, the capital of the newly-organised province of Moesia, on the Black Sea, where he remained for the last nine or ten years of his life. Ovid himself attributed his banishment to a "poem and a mistake", but his reluctance to disclose specifics has resulted in much speculation among scholars.
“He that gives time to resolve gives leisure to deny, and warning to prepare.”
— Quarrels.
Francis Quarles (about 8 May 1592 – 8 September 1644) was an English poet most notable for his emblem book entitled Emblems. The work by which Quarles is best known, the Emblems, was originally published in 1634, with grotesque illustrations engraved by William Marshall and others. The forty-five prints in the last three books are borrowed from the designs by Boetius à Bolswert for the Pia Desideria (Antwerp, 1624) of Herman Hugo. Each "emblem" consists of a paraphrase from a passage of Scripture, expressed in ornate and metaphorical language, followed by passages from the Christian Fathers, and concluding with an epigram of four lines.
More quotes on “delay.”
“The procrastinator is not only indolent and weak, but commonly false, too; most of the weak are false.”
— Lavater.
“He who prorogues* the honesty of today till tomorrow will probably prorogue his tomorrows to eternity.”
— Lavater.
* DEFER, POSTPONE
Johann Kaspar (or Caspar) Lavater (15 November 1741 – 2 January 1801) was a Swiss poet, writer, philosopher, physiognomist and theologian. In 1788 William Blake annotated Lavater's Aphorisms of Man. Lavater published 632 aphorisms in all. Blake considered the following aphorism to be an excellent example of an aphorism. "40. Who, under pressing temptations to lie, adheres to truth, nor to the profane betrays aught of a sacred trust, is near the summit of wisdom and virtue."
“Time drinketh up the essence of every great and noble action, which ought to be performed, and is delayed in the execution.”
- Vishnu Sarma.
Vishnu Sharma (Born c. 4th–6th centuries CE) was an Indian scholar and author who wrote the Panchatantra, a collection of fables. Panchatantra is one of the most widely translated non-religious books in history. The Panchatantra was translated into Middle Persian/Pahlavi in 570 CE by Borzūya and into Arabic in 750 CE by Persian scholar Abdullah Ibn al-Muqaffa as Kalīlah wa Dimnah. In Baghdad, the translation commissioned by Al-Mansur, the second Abbasid Caliph, is claimed to have become "second only to the Qu'ran in popularity." As early as the eleventh century this work reached Europe, and before 1600 it existed in Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, German, English, Old Slavonic, Czech, and perhaps other Slavonic languages. Its range has extended from Java to Iceland." In France, "at least eleven Panchatantra tales are included in the work of Jean de La Fontaine."
“There is no avoidance in delay.”
— Aeschylus
Aeschylus (c. 525/524 – c. 456/455 BC) was an Ancient Greek tragedian often described as the father of tragedy. Academic knowledge of the genre begins with his work, and understanding of earlier Greek tragedy is largely based on inferences made from reading his surviving plays. According to Aristotle, he expanded the number of characters in the theatre and allowed conflict among them. Formerly, characters interacted only with the chorus.
A look at Twitter (X) on a word search for “delay.” Most of the posts are directly associated with my particular take on the subject for today.
I found an article on the old maxim, justice delayed is justice denied, in which many country’s legal systems were analyzed. I do think that the primary emphasis was on business law in this study. Regardless it broadly sheds light on our American legal system as related to others as far as quality. The entire study is available online to study if you so want to do so. Below are some excerpts from the study plus an image of a wide range of countries whose legal systems were analyzed.
International Review of Law and Economics
Volume 65, March 2021,
International Review of Law and Economics
Is justice delayed justice denied? An empirical approach☆
Authors
Alessandro Melcarne
Giovanni B. Ramello
Rok Spruk @rokspru
An interesting post from Rok Spruk on Twitter (X) which I thought to include. It is related to the pandemic, and may not be politically correct as the author notes.
Is Justice delayed, justice denied?
Abstract
Improving judicial performance in order to enhance the business environment has been a policy goal for many governments in the last decades. Following the suggestions of several international organizations, most countries have tried to speed up their case resolution systems by streamlining judicial procedure. However, not as much attention has been devoted to test the potential drawbacks of similar reforms in terms of supplying a quicker but yet qualitatively inferior justice, thus contradicting the well-known legal maxim justice delayed is justice denied. The present work wishes to contribute to the empirical literature on the topic by proposing two alternative ways to further disentangle the relationship between judicial performance and judicial quality. Exploiting a dataset of 171 countries for the 2003–2016 time period, we find statistically significant evidence of a strong and negative relationship between courts’ delay and countries’ quality of the justice. While the intrinsic limits of this kind of institutional empirical analysis suggest caution when interpreting our estimates as proof of causality, we present more robust evidence suggesting that countries characterized by faster judiciaries seem to be equally not affected by a deterioration of the quality of justice, thus confirming the aforementioned maxim, at least descriptively.
Introduction
In the last two decades, the legal maxim, justice delayed is justice denied has been at the center of domestic and international policies agendas all around the world, especially for its economic consequences. If economic theory has always assumed property rights to be smoothly enforced by courts, nowadays it is quite obvious that even an efficient rule will at best operate ineffectively if not properly enforced. Given the incomplete nature of the contracts that regulate business transactions, trading partners encourage reciprocal investments by establishing long-term business relations. Nonetheless, such investments might be interpreted as sunk costs, incentivizing opportunistic behaviors. If contractual obligations are not respected, thus capturing trading rents, ceteris paribus suppliers will try to leverage their monopoly power and impose higher prices.
It is thus clear that the only way to solve this problem is for judiciaries to limit such opportunistic behaviors. Each time a case is brought to court, uncertainty arises with regards to the legal issues hereby litigated. As a consequence, a fast judiciary acts as a fundamental deterrent against economic agents’ willingness to deviate from previously signed contracts. By solving legal disputes, judges produce a “judge-made” legal certainty, limiting the negative externalities deriving from opportunism. By decreasing uncertainty and making contractual obligations more likely to be performed, a functioning judiciary contributes to encourage investments and ultimately economic development.
Within this theoretical framework, international organization starting with the World Bank's Doing Business program (World Bank, 2016) and the seminal work by Djankov et al. (2003), but also the OECD (Palumbo et al., 2013) and its European counterparts (CEPEJ, 2014) have devoted a lot of attention to the measurement of courts’ performance and the ways to improve it. Similar policy orientations have been supported by an equally vibrant scholarly literature that has tried to empirically estimate the positive effect of a well-functioning judiciary and a fast litigation system for economic development.
Nonetheless, these studies mostly concentrate their attention to estimate the estimation of a causal impact of judicial performance on some socio-economic outcome, usually exploiting some exogenous variation in courts’ delay. Accordingly, not much as been said about what are the true determinants of courts’ performances. Early literature claimed procedural formalism to be the most relevant driver favoring the speeding up of legal cases’ resolution. As said above, these results have then vastly inspired the policy suggestions of international organizations like the World Bank: a less formalized procedure would allow courts to deliberate faster, thus ultimately supporting economic activity.
Similar positions have attracted many criticisms mainly suggesting that a faster judiciary does not necessarily imply a better justice and that improving quantitative indicators might come at the cost of an overall deterioration in the quality of the judiciary's work. In order to empirically test the hypothesis that justice delayed is actually justice denied, one must first discuss whether the performance of judiciaries (in its quantitative dimension) is in somewhat contrast with the overall quality of the “justice” delivered by courts. In other words, is there a trade-off between timeliness and quality of justice?
Regardless of the specific quantitative dimension of judicial performance taken into consideration (delay, productivity, clearance rate or technical efficiency), the emphasis always lays on aspects such as the number of cases solved with given resources or the timeliness of their disposition. Nothing is said about “how” such cases are dealt: are cases solved correctly? Is legal truth ascertained via judicial decisions? Is the Rule of Law respected? One might thus suggest that judicial performance and the quality of justice might not necessarily correlate positively.
Marciano et al. (2019) have discussed several potential reasons that could motivate the existence of a trade-off between quality and timeliness. The main point derives from the fact that measures of judicial performance as delay do not carry much information about the qualitative dimension of judges’ work and thus the way the law is actually enforced. Accordingly, a well-performing judiciary that is able to enforce contracts in a timely way, could at the same time imply systematic violations of the rule of law, thus turning into a sort of “extractive” institution (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012). Another theoretical motivation for a negative correlation between quality and judicial delay derives from the fact that a qualitatively good legal enforcement should make the judiciary more bound to the legal framework and thus, potentially, slower and less effective. While a theoretically ideal court should be able to solve cases almost instantly Djankov et al. (2003), physical and procedural constraints necessarily slow the work of judges. Accordingly, one might say that if reducing judicial delay is beneficial for the economy, making justice needs time and thus reduction of delay (better quantitative performance) might come at the cost of worsening the quality of justice, thus contradicting the aforementioned legal maxim.
Preliminary evidence seems to confute the existence of a trade-off between quality and timeliness. The correlation between judicial performance and quality of justice seems to be positive, suggesting that countries with fast judiciaries are also the ones granting a good quality of justice. Nonetheless, more recent works (Marciano et al., 2019) suggest that once controlling for factors that could interplay with these measures, such correlation, despite remaining positive, looses all its statistical significance. As Posner (1998) claims, we might have some sort of chicken or the egg dilemma: a country without an established “justice” might not have the means to afford a fast judiciary, but without timely decisions, no country can afford to deliver fair justice. If causality was to run in the opposite direction as the legal maxim states, this would significantly undermine the impact of the policy suggestions made by the aforementioned international bodies.
Building on these preliminary findings, the main contribution of this work is to try to advance some further claims on the relationship between judicial performance and the quality of justice. Well aware of the difficulty of assessing causal relationships among institutional variables as correctly suggested by Klick (2010) and Helland (2016), we propose some alternative methodologies, highlighting their pros and cons, that might better approach the “ideal” first best result of isolating a causal impact of courts’ delay on the quality of justice and thus try to empirically test the famous legal maxim: justice delayed is justice denied. Employing a new way of instrumenting judicial delay and a panel vector autoregression approach, we find statistical significant results confirming the strong positive relationship between judicial performance and the quality of justice. Despite statistical tests seem to support the validity or our approach, given the limits of this kind of research, we remain though cautious when interpreting our estimates as causal inference, hoping future literature might build upon our results to further advance this stream of institutional empirical analysis.
Is justice delayed justice denied? The descriptive evidence so far merely documents a strong positive relationship between judicial performance and quality. We are well aware of the fact that, because of issues of measurement error and omitted variable bias, providing a definitive answer when dealing with similar institutional variables is far from easy. Accordingly, we now try to contribute to the scholarly debate by suggesting two new ways to approach this problem.
5. Concluding Remarks
Is justice delayed justice denied? This well-known legal maxim, according to some attributable to British Prime Minister William E. Gladstone (1809-1898), has found various practical applications in a number of countries’ legislations. From article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights to the US federal statutes regulating the consequences for “slow” judges (Title 28, §476(a)(3)). Far from being confined to a generic legal principle, this maxim has also inspired the reforms attempting to improve the performance of national judiciaries all around the world. In fact, the empirical findings showing that faster judiciaries are beneficial for economic development inspired international organization to promote some sort of “one size fits all” policy suggestion in favor of streamlining procedure and speeding up the resolution of lawsuits. How- ever, the same literature promoting the importance of fast judiciaries has only vaguely attempted to tackle the potential drawbacks of a quicker case resolution in terms of the possible deteriorations of the overall quality of the justice system.
The present work has attempted to contribute to this literature by trying to address directly this issue from an empirical perspective. We have motivated the reasons why it is important for the scholarly debate to further disentangle the interplay between quality of justice and judicial performance. Then we have proposed two alternative identification strategies that might, to a certain extent, better cope with the intrinsic limits that the empirical analysis of institutional variables inevitably has to deal with. We use the number of procedural steps necessary to solve a case as an innovative instrumental variable for capturing plausibly exogenous variation of judicial delay and a panel vector autoregressive approach. Our estimates confirm the existence of a significant negative relationship between judicial delay and the quality of justice, thus suggesting that in countries where justice is delayed, justice is also denied. However, as we already emphasized above, we remain cautious with respect to interpreting our results in line with a causal effect. Accordingly, we cannot give a definitive answer to the question raised above. Nonetheless, we hope that building upon our results future scholarship might be able to further refine the empirical analysis and be able to ascertain the causality running from judicial performance to the quality of justice.
And an image of the results of this study in which the USA can be compared with other countries. It might seem from this that we fair pretty well overall. But perhaps not with people named Trump
My “sorta sonnet” was written to try and catch the mood of it all.
In Our Airplane Going Through Flak
Justice delayed is justice denied we hear,
It seems this maxim is for the most part true,
Trump’s legal witchery is his sordid brew,
His large legal team is always cavalier,
We all know, behind the mask, is only fear,
Trump is certainly a very sticky glue,
Weak-kneed flying monkeys into the air flew,
A dictatorship is to be their frontier.
So America is under tyrant attack,
We can’t help but to be very off balance,
We must once again look upon our ballots,
In our airplane avoiding exploding flak,
Can some quality law finally arrive,
Will our democracy in the end survive.
So that’s what I have for today. Thanks for reading what I had to say. It might have become rather repetitive, my writings, my views can’t perhaps change on American politics in these times. And I’m stubborn enough to think I can alter other’s views. So I keep doing what I’m doing.
185th posting, March 28, 2024.