How fair is the law?

By Alex S.

Our “underlying theme” for the Junior Urban Adventure this year was Global Problems, Local Solutions- that is, we needed to consider a problem that affects many people around the world and help to find a solution with our question. As it happened, when I found out that I was going to be in the “Law” section, I was watching a news report that mentioned a small family filing a lawsuit against a business that had a large law firm on their side. It got me wondering how fair the modern legal world was, and whether average people still had a chance to affect change via the legal system, the entire purpose of which is to prevent injustice against people with less power.
Obviously, the answer to this question has massive implications all over the world. If the little people don’t have any voice in the legal system, then they may as well not have a voice at all, because businesses and individuals can ignore protests and angry letters much easier than court dates and jail sentences. Figuring that there were probably a great deal of both large law firms and solo practitioners in Boston, I thought the JUA would be a good chance to ask people on both sides of the “legal divide”, as well as people like judges and ordinary citizens what they felt about the situation: is it still possible for regular people to make changes via the legal system?
When it came to asking regular people, I got a variety of answers. A janitor working in Boston’s North Station believed that wealthy businesses and individuals had enough power to make the legal system do whatever they want, while a business-man looking type believed that government oversight agencies and the unbiased attitudes of judges kept this sort of thing in check. After asking several more people, I came to the conclusion that people’s attitudes regarding the legal system roughly corresponded to their socioeconomic class: the better off you were, the fairer you regarded the system to be.
I was pleased to find that, contrary to my original expectations, a great deal of evidence pointed to the conclusion that the legal system was still fair for the not-so-well-off. I discovered that large law firms actually had little advantage over solo practitioners in terms of the quality of their legal persuasion (I was quite surprised to hear an employee of a large legal firm actually admitting this): the difference is that they can contribute more manpower to a case, but the cases they are assigned to are often phenomenally more complex (like patent infringement cases), so the difference evens itself out. There are also different safeguards within the legal system itself to prevent such discrimination, such as different classes of judges and juries for different types of cases. At present, all the evidence I found seems to indicate that the legal system is still fair.