Comment by hliyan
16 days ago
I wonder whether this type of situation is an artifact of the US system of law being focused on codification / literalism / textualism, as opposed to the UK and similar systems where common law or judge made law has more weight, which permits the injection of some level of common sense into situations where a literal interpretation of the statutes would lead to ridiculous outcomes.
In the UK the vast majority of prosecutions are made by the Crown Prosecution Service. The CPS are civil servants and, unlike in the US where they elect the guy emptying the trash, the crossing guards and the receptionist, these are just career lawyers.
Most importantly here, the CPS has a "Test" https://www.cps.gov.uk/publication/code-crown-prosecutors#se... to tell them whether they should prosecute people. This is going to weed out a whole lot of the worst examples you'll see in the US.
You may remember Horizon not so long back, which was a gross misscarriage of justice in which large numbers of people who effectively worked for the Post Office were accused of crimes, in some cases jailed and even in a few cases committed suicide. Horizon is exceptional because, since mail was historically very important, the Post Office actually did have the same power as a Crown Prosecutor. Those cases were still sometimes really the fault of the CPS (not least because the CPS has a legal right to just seize control of, and then terminate a prosecution if they believe it would be prudent to do so) but are exceptional because most organisations could not have done this even if they wanted to try it.
> In the UK the vast majority of prosecutions are made by the Crown Prosecution Service. The CPS are civil servants and, unlike in the US where they elect the guy emptying the trash, the crossing guards and the receptionist, these are just career lawyers.
Where did you get the idea that what you're saying is accurate about the US?
In the US most prosecutors are not elected, they are also civil servants and career lawyers. Their boss, a County or State Attorney, typically is elected, but they rarely prosecute cases.
I've also never elected a garbage man, crossing guard, or a receptionist in my life, but I've only been voting for almost 30 years now. Maybe it'll come up soon.
The "guy emptying the trash" and so on were hyperbole. Perhaps I should have made that clearer. Americans elect far too many of these roles and that's a problem but it is true that, so far at least, they do not elect the people who empty their trash.
The ultimate boss at the CPS is just a lawyer, his boss is the Attorney General for England and Wales and the Attorney General (although also usually a lawyer) is a politician, typically an elected politician. But that's quite a lot more distance between your criminal case and somebody trying to get re-elected.
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This is kind of true. What is unusual about the Post Office is that they have exceptional investigatory powers but anyone can bring a prosecution in the UK.
And it is an important freedom. If the state is declining to prosecute its own, citizens should be able to.
In my view the biggest problem is the credulity of the courts, who are inclined to believe evidence from corporate officers by default, and often refuse efforts to challenge it. The late Ross Anderson documented many cases from the 1990s onwards of people being convicted on bullshit technical evidence.
Maybe the CPS would have seen through it if they had conducted the prosecutions, but I don't think that's obviously true.
It's a negligible freedom. The CPS can always choose to seize control of any prosecution and, if it sees fit, discontinue the prosecution. So at most they can choose to ignore a prosecution unless either the prosecutor or accused bring it to their attention specifically, and if that happens they're obliged to actually do something (though that might be explicitly taking no action, it's distinct from ignorance because there's a process they have to follow by law to decide what to do).
This is an important defence - every Post Office defendant could have chosen (or rather, their lawyers knowing the law could have done so) to flag their case for this process and force the CPS to decide what to do and as you say it's conceivable that in the most egregious cases that would have stopped it †
There are definitely flaws in this system, I just have more confidence in it than I do for the American system. I didn't know Ross Anderson was dead. He did some really good work.
† We know it wouldn't have always worked because there are Horizon casees where the CPS are the listed prosecutor. Jurors weren't the only people who gullibly accepted that the Computer is infallible, but at least the CPS were not employees of the executives who knew this was bullshit and have largely escaped any consequences.
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Both the US and UK operate under common-law systems with substantial judicial precedent. In practice, there is very little difference between the two systems.
For those of us who are outside of the US, can someone explain why we see things like a judge ordering a 7 year old without legal representation to file legal paperwork? https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/15/us/lawyers-unaccompanied-...
I'm not a lawyer, but I always associated (perhaps wrongly) common law with common sense. I don't see much of the latter here.
“Immigration judges” are not judges in the normal sense, they’re employees of the Department of Justice.
Unless you're in Louisiana, which has some really weird processes.
Specifically in Louisiana you need to ask for a lawyer when arrested, not a 'lawyer dog'
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The U.S. system of law is also based on common law, and is indeed derived from the English legal system. It's called "English common law".
With the exception of Louisiana, the US system of law is rooted in the common law as inherited directly from the UK in the late 18th century, so no.
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