I used the following piece as an experiment of sorts, checking whether justice is a liberal value, a conservative value, or a professional value for legal professionals.

To check its appeal to liberals I submitted it as an op-ed first to the New York Times, and then to Washington Post. Both rejected it. So we can be positive that justice is NOT a liberal value. On the conservative side, neither the Washington Times, nor the Wall Street Journal, nor the on-line journal The American Thinker were interested. So justice is definitely NOT a conservative value.

On the professional side, I tired the American Lawyer. No interest whatsoever — from which we can rightly conclude that justice is certainly NOT a professional value for legal professionals.

So it looks as if justice is of concern only for the person to whom it had been denied. And yet, as my piece amply demonstrates, such is not the case: injustice perpetrated in one place manages to bulge out, and cause horrible problems in elsewhere.

So may be we all should care for justice, after all… Just judge for yourself:

The Price of Injustice of Our Justice System

Lev Tsitrin

Let’s figure the price tag of 21st century’s wars of religion. Take the cost of the attack of 9/11, 2001; add that of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Throw in the impending war against the Islamic State. Provisionally, factor in the upcoming effort to keep Iran from going nuclear. And then, there is small change – drone attacks in Yemen and Somalia and suchlike not-too-conspicuous action.

Comes down to a pretty penny, right? A few trillion dollars so far, give or take.

And this is just cold cash spent on personnel, logistics, equipment, and munitions. There is also cost in human suffering, less tangible but far more painful – some ten thousand Americans killed and few times as many maimed and wounded, not to mention several hundred thousand Middle Easterners killed either because they chose to get into the fight, or because they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, becoming either the “collateral damage” of anti-terror strikes, or victims of suicide bombings.

And then, consider the effectiveness of that huge expense of life and treasure. Does it get us any closer to putting an end to Islamic terrorism? Not really. It simply treats the symptoms. The disease itself – the desire to bring the benighted humanity into compliance with God’s will as revealed to Mohammed – is by no means dented. Hundreds of high-minded fresh recruits willing to fight and die for that noble cause keep popping up daily.

Of course, there is another way of dealing with the problem – by attacking head-on its underlying cause, the idea that underpin terrorists’ actions. For it is easy to show (as I did in the book “The Pitfall of Truth: Holy War, its Rationale and Folly“) that Islamic terrorist’s worldview rests on a single, unconscious (or, to use logicians’ professional term, “hidden”) premise: the instinctive assumption that he or she can determine that Mohammed was a prophet. However, once clearly articulated and examined, this philosophical cornerstone of the entirety of a “true believer’s” thinking and action turns out to be factually wrong: there is no way for anyone to know whether God did, or did not, talk to Mohammed. The thing is simply impossible. And while this does not sound too dramatic in the context of a secular culture, in purely religious terms that reliance on what’s unreliable is of tremendous consequence, since it turns the eager fighter for the cause of True Faith into an idolater – a person whose object of worship is a figment of his own imagination.

Keep in mind that idol-worship is something deeply despised in Islam. So to throw terrorists off-balance and to nip Islamic terrorism in the bud, it is sufficient to point out that bin Laden, Khomenei, Nasrallah, and their followers are just idol-worshipers. The self-styled “true believers” would have to realize that they are what they hate the most – and would have to change their ways. Problem solved.

But this rational response to terrorism is not deployable: our government, apparently realizing that the pen is mightier than the sword and that words are weapons, regulates our presumably “free” speech in a way that is more in keeping with the Second amendment, requiring tight control, rather than with the free-for-all First.

Here is how it works: you put your ideas down on paper – but book publishers are just not interested. So, counting on this being the land “with liberty for all,” you decide to publish your book yourself – for after all, what’s the difference between a book and a book? The difference is, that because government doesn’t want you to speak out of your own mouth, without another’s permission, it keeps your book out of its database built for the libraries and bookstores to find and acquire upcoming titles in their area of interest, the database that is the gateway to the mainstream “marketplace of ideas.” Without passing this entry point your book it still-born, starved of the mainstream audience. Only corporate publishers are allowed in by the government, so only “vetted” books (government’s term, not mine) could find their way to the readers. (It is amusing that the much-maligned “Citizens United” decision of the Supreme Court gets bashed because it presumably grants corporations the speech rights of individuals – while individuals’ rights are literally nothing when compared to corporations’!)

This neat arrangement means that we do not have “free” speech (this kind can only be uttered by individuals.) What we do have, is the collective, corporate, encumbered speech – the supervised, altered, emasculated speech that passed someone else’s approval first, the approval of the corporate publisher acting as a censor. The “free marketplace of ideas” turns out to be the marketplace of censored (sorry, “vetted”) ideas.

Since this scheme (or, more accurately, scam) clearly abridges authors’ speech rights (given that speech is a communication between the speaker and the audience, abridgment of audience of author-published books effected by the government is a clear-cut abridgment of author’s First amendment’s right to speech), as well as of his or her property rights (for the government’s database is obviously a tool of exercising the copyright, and copyright always belongs to the author, not the publisher), you put your trust (not to mention tons and tons of money) into “justice for all” to restore First amendment’s “liberty for all,” and sue the government.

And you lose, because it turns out that federal courts do not work as advertised by the ubiquitous Lady Justice, impartially evaluating arguments provided by parties. Federal judges do not hear cases that were filed; instead, they adjudicate cases that they invent out of thin air, cases based not on parties’ argument, but on imaginary argument either fabricated for a party by judges themselves, or concocted by them by reversing a party’s actual argument. To read their decisions is to hear judges audibly tell you “if the government argued what it actually argued, I would have decided the case for you; but because the government argued something utterly different from what it argued, I decided the case for the government,” or “if you argued what you’ve actually argued, I would have given you the victory. But because you argued the exact opposite of what you argued, I gave victory to the government.” And then, judges simply attach the decision in the
made-up case to the actual one.

Given that at the most basic level, justice consists of the judge hearing a case – and that actual cases are not being heard – the practices of our federal judges have as much to do with justice as Bernie Madoff’s had to do with investing. But there is a difference: Bernie Madoff is serving 150 years in jail, but if you sue judges for fraud (as I did), you will be told that judges have the right to act “maliciously or corruptly” (per Pierson v. Ray), and that substituting parties’ argument with judges’ own fantasies, or with the exact polar opposite of the actual argument of the party is the “classical application of the judicial function” (per Tsitrin v. Vitaliano). So forget “justice for all.” And with it, forget “liberty for all,” forget the constitutional promise of free speech.

That our federal courts do not aim at delivering justice does not come as a shock to the legal professionals I talk to; to them, the sheer Kafkaesqueness of what we call the “due process of the law” is a given. As one lawyer matter-of-factly put it, “the judicial system was not created to deliver justice. This is simply not its purpose. It has its uses, but justice simply isn’t one of them.”

So let us count what this absence of justice cost us. Because it deprives us of free speech, we cannot defeat terrorism by using reason to expose the basic error of terrorism’s underpinning philosophy. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but it is being silenced by judicial fraud.

So we shoot instead of talking. The reason is silent, the sword is unleashed – to the tune of trillions of dollars wasted on wars, and of horrid shrieks of hundreds of thousands getting maimed and killed.

Federal judges obviously see the absence of justice as beneficial. One wonders whether this benefit – be it real or imagined – is worth such a frightful price.

Before you laugh at the question, consider the fascinating fact which I learned when suing a bunch of federal judges for the obvious fraud they committed while adjudicating my case: in their defense those judges invariably claimed to have what they called “sovereign immunity from prosecution.”

Think about it for a second. In a monarchical system, the monarch is sovereign over the people, who are just his subjects. Accordingly, the government bureaucracy, being merely the emanation of royal power and the instrument by which the monarch exercises his dominion over the populace, is sovereign too. As an extension of the sovereign, the government has sovereignty over the people.

But who is the sovereign in a republic?

The people. And since by definition there can be only one sovereign in a state, in a republic the government cannot possibly be its sovereign: if it were the sovereign, than the people would no longer have sovereignty. When people are sovereign, the government isn’t. Simple as that.

Yet in claiming the right to “sovereign immunity” as protection from litigation against it’s misdeeds, the US government of necessity claims to be the sovereign. From which it automatically follows that the American people, in accepting this arrangement, surrendered their sovereignty, and along with it, gave up the republican form of government.

When asked by an eager passer-by what form of government was chosen by the Constitutional convention for the United States, Benjamin Franklin famously replied “republic, if you can keep it.”

We couldn’t. In fact, we didn’t try. We did not have a chance.

It was largely Benjamin Franklin’s, and other founding fathers’ fault: they completely failed to grasp the fact that the new form of the union required a totally new, republican form of the judiciary – the judiciary that served people and not their rulers, the judiciary that sought justice, rather than the interests of the judges’ political masters, the judiciary that actually considered the case before it by applying logic to parties’ argument and gave victory to the stronger one, rather than the judiciary that instinctively figured out which outcome would be best for the powers that be, and substituted parties argument with their own fantasies so as to use those fake “findings” that fit the predetermined outcome as a fig leaf, the net result being that the actual cases brought by the parties themselves were never considered, justice being trampled on with total impunity by the arbitrary “justice” system.

Instead, our founding fathers left judges to their own devices – and the judges merrily reverted to the previous, traditional, monarchical jurisprudence, treating our nominally-republican government as the sovereign, and the nominally-sovereign public as its subjects, to be treated with utter disdain.

Given that federal courts – the very place to which we have to turn to enforce our sovereign constitutional rights of citizens of the republic – is a thoroughly monarchical institution that claims sovereignty over us, thus treating us as subjects and feeling free to use lies and fraud to deny us justice, the question is a valid one. Is the US a republic? Or is it, after all, a monarchy?

The first thing that comes to mind when hearing the name of Iranian ex-president Ahmadinejad is “a Holocaust denier.” Infamously, he organized cartoon contests mocking the Holocaust, and at every opportunity denied that it ever happened.

Why? Not because he was a historian who studied the Nuremberg trials and the Eichmann case, who delved in the archives and interviewed the eye-witnesses, coming as a result to the conclusion that the Holocaust never happened. O, not at all.

His was not a truth-seeker’s, but a politician’s approach. Seeking to destroy Israel, and perceiving that much of the European support for Israel was due both to the sorrow over the fate of the European Jewry, and the feeling of guilt over their countrymen’s wartime contribution to Hitler’s “Final Solution,” Ahmadinejad figured that the memory of the Holocaust stood in the way of depriving Israel of whatever European support it enjoyed.

And so remove that support, he declared that there never was a Holocaust! Problem solved!

Facts are no impediment for a politician; the convenient ones are trumpeted, the inconvenient ones are either ignored, or substituted with lies: the ends justify the means.

Which approach is true not just of Ahmadinejad, but of our own federal judges too. They do not let such minor, insignificant, pesky little thing as a “fact” to get in a way of deciding the case the way they want. While it may not be convenient for federal judges – at this time at least – to deny the Holocaust, facts adduced by the parties in support of their position are if no import to the federal ,judges, and are routinely substituted by them with their exact opposite, or by those invented by judges themselves out of thin air. The ends justify the means after all; the desired outcome is just too important to be derailed by an honest procedure that entails evaluation of facts and law contained in parties’ argument.

So is there a difference between America’s federal judges, and Iran’s Ahmadinejad? Certainly in the specifics of their declarations, but by not in the overall approach, and the methods employed. Fact-denial and brazen fraud were vital to Ahmadinejad’s modus operandi, and continue to be the most indispensable tools in the arsenal of our federal judiciary.

So is it fair to call our federal judges “American Ahmadinejads?”

Absolutely!

Give this NPR segment a listen. Two journalists are discussing how judges make their decision, and the biases they allow to creep in. Nowhere is evaluation of parties’ argument is even mentioned as part of the procedure (leave alone it being the key — and for that matter, ONLY part of what should go on during judging). Instead, it appears that the judge decides at his will who’ll win, who’ll lose.

And that’s what bizarre (and very revealing) about this clip — both journalists take it for granted that this is how judging is ought to proceed. Not a word of protest or opposition is uttered. That’s how it is, and that’s it.

I wonder the reaction of those two if they read the Declaration of Independence — the part that lists illegalities and outrages committed in the colonies by the government of George III. I guess they would also just shrug their shoulders at the notion of billeting of solders in private homes or of taxation without representation, and say “so what? that’s the way of the world!”

Because that’s their reaction in the radio segment. Judges don’t follow judicial process, but rule arbitrarily? What’s there to see?

We notice outrageous things, but fail to notice that they are outrageous.

Are we so deaf that we can’t even hear what we ourselves say?

Sure, by now it’s just a custom; but but this custom had to start somewhere. And I wonder why it goes on, given that federal judges are by no stretch of imagination honest, upstanding, or honorable people.

Could the demand to be called “honorable” be an over-compensation for not being honorable? May be. Or maybe it is a deliberate attempt by the powers-that-be, who know full well that any critical analysis of the existing judicial process would cause a complete disillusionment with it, to build a wall and a moat around federal judiciary’s motivations and rationale so we don’t even think of thinking of critically examining judges’ methods, but rather stand in awe of the federal bench as if it were the new holy of holies? Is it thus done to brainwash us into uncritically accepting as higher wisdom whatever garbage comes from the federal bench, so as to easily control us, and allay the potential discontent by the use, as a clinching argument, of “this is so because a federal judge said it is so?” Is it thus to substitute reason with reverence, and to proactively preclude even a remote possibility of criticism, and by extension, any doubt in the higher wisdom of the rulers?

Creating artificial awe towards fellow-humans is a well-known trick: the deeds (or rather misdeeds) of “your Majesties” and “your Holinesses” fill most pages of history books, showing how dumb, stupid or crooked were the humans that bore them. So, some two and a half centuries ago people on this side of the Atlantic chose to put an end to all this nonsense; venerating “your Majesty” came to a screeching halt. Yet unaccountably, the faith in the judiciary managed to survive. Time has long come to judge the judges by their actions, rather than accord them artificial, unearned respect when in fact, having given themselves the right to act “maliciously and corruptly,” they just do not deserve any.

There is a glaring omission in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 66 that so masterfully enumerates tragic absurdities of human existence – the absence of any mention of grotesqueness of the judicial system.

The only possible reason for this gap I can think of, is that one line was simply not enough to encompass this phenomenon.

And indeed, such was the case! The entire sonnet dealing with the Law has been recently discovered!

The circumstances of this thrilling literary event were as follows: while waiting for a train, I suddenly felt inside me the up-swelling of the wave of amazing inspiration, and the words just began to flow. Not being a poet, I realized that the spirit of the Bard was here, trying to communicate to the world his lost, and greatest, masterpiece though me.

Thrilled to be of assistance to Shakespeare, no matter in how humble a role, I grabbed a pencil and swiftly set down the following immortal lines, later adding the compiler’s preface uniform with the standard editions of the Sonnets:

To the practitioners whose actions inspired
this ensuing Sonnet – US Judges Lettow, Vitaliano, Jacobs, Katzmann, Livingston, Roberts, Garaufis, Buchwald, Garland, Tatel, Brown, Shofield et al
from its onlie begetter, the spirit of WS [and his amanuensis LT]

Sonnet 66a

Tired with all these, for court reform I cry,
As to behold the judge a lawyer born,
And Lady Justice beaming honesty,
And faith in courts still kept, and not forsworn;
And how much money on court fees is spent,
And how much more to lawyers goes bright,
And brilliance of the argument they send,
And feel of victory this argument provide;
And judge replacing it with nonsense dull,
And rule on basis of his blatant fraud,
And plaintiffs’ clear victory annul,
And we this farce as the “due process” laud;

Tired with all these, all these I’d overthrown,
But hard it is for me to fight alone.

Give this interesting New York Times’ piece, titled Supreme Injustice a read. It fully confirms what has been proven on this blog time and again – that federal judicial process is thoroughly arbitrary, that it has nothing whatsoever to do with evaluation of parties’ argument, that the huge lawyers’ fees that go into forming it are a waste of money, since judges do not examine it but instead invent their own argument for parties, and that “due process” is an utter farce.

Read also the readers’ feedback – the overwhelming gist of which being full recognition that impartial judiciary is a myth, and that courts are cynical political tools of control.

So while there is full consensus that impartial judging is a fiction, when I sued the US Justice Department to remove images of Lady Justice from federal courthouses as deceitful – which she most certainly is, representing as impartial the process which everyone (federal judges themselves including) acknowledge to be anything but – Judge Lorna Shofield immediately, without even waiting for defendant’s reply to the complaint, kicked it out of court as “frivolous.”

But was it frivolous? My personal litigation experience shows it wasn’t; the New York Times now states it wasn’t; New York Times’ readers’ agree it wasn’t.

Rather, the dismissal of the lawsuit was Judge Shofield’s exercise of the arbitrary power of the federal bench, and in her utter disregard for justice.

In any event, it was good to read a confirmation in the New York Times that I am indeed in the right, and that federal judges are indeed in the wrong – and that Lady Justice is a deceitful myth, and is got to go!

A while back, I had an interesting exchange with a lady who ran an academic “Center for Justice.” (There are plenty of grandiloquently named organizations, academic or otherwise, with “justice” as a centerpiece of their name – not many of which actually care a straw about justice.) When I mentioned to her that judges fraudulently substitute parties’ argument with judges’ fabrications, and decide case based on those, she told me “I don’t believe you!” (an academic, you know, living in an ivory tower, having zero practical, life experience); and, when I told her that her fellow-academics with whom I had a chance to talk before, absurdly thought that justice was done simply when a judge heard the case, irrespective of whether the decision logically followed from parties’ argument or not (leaving alone whether parties’ argument had at all been considered), she hastened to confirm that this same absurdity was precisely what constituted justice.

Which begs a practical question of whether, for instance, the Communist show trials were an example of justice? According to my academic interlocutor, they must have been – the judge presided over them, and all the legal i-s got dotted, and all the legal t-s got crossed. And yet, not many (in what we call the “free world,” at any rate) would agree that those trials had anything at all to do with justice.

Or, to put it differently, how does the so-called “obstruction of justice” fit into her definition of “justice?”

After all, obstruction of justice, when it happens, happens in court, under a judge’s nose. It happens when the actual underlying facts of the case are being altered so as to produce the outcome that is opposite to the one that would have been achieved had the actual facts have been actually considered. Here is, from Wikipedia:   “Generally, obstruction charges are laid when it is discovered that a person questioned in an investigation, other than a suspect, has lied to the investigating officers… Obstruction charges can also be laid if a person alters, destroys, or conceals physical evidence… Obstruction can include crimes committed by judges, prosecutors, attorneys general, and elected officials in general…”

Do we have “justice” when the judge bases his or her ruling on the “facts” twisted out of shape by “obstruction of justice?” If yes, than “obstruction of justice” should have no negative connotation, and not be a crime – since it still leads to justice. If the answer is a “no” than the definition of the “justice” as simply an outcome of a “judicial process” is patiently false. “Due process” may or may not result in justice – and the criterion for whether justice was done is whether the actual facts did, or did not, underpin the decision.
If judge’s decision resulted not from the actual facts, but from fantasies fabricated by judges, than there was no justice.

Bottom line: “justice” hinges on facts, not on the judge; and the fact that federal judges gave themselves the right to substitute the facts with their fantasies means that our federal courts are seats of injustice, no matter what the academics – who are ignoramuses, for all their book learning, tell us about justice.

Sometimes one bumps into a sheer mystery. Consider this piece I saw in the Daily Beast – about judges deciding cases where one of the parties is a company in which the judge has an investment, contrary to the (non-enforceable) court rules.

Judges are parties to the case they are adjudicating? As I know full well, that’s a routine, so I started reading though the comments. And right on top, was this wonderful heart-felt one:

neongranny Does anyone have respect for the court system in this country anymore?  If you do, you’re stupid.  And, if you think there’s only malfeasance in the higher courts, you are really a babe in the woods!  Of course, I live in the Land of Walker.  This is common everyday practice here…well…nowadays, it’s common everywhere.  What to do…what to do…

To which I replied: @neongranny I don’t know if your “what to do” is just rhetorical – but, as a practical step, I’d suggest you visit the site of the Coalition Against Judicial Fraud, www.cajfr.org – offering some really good ideas (like hiring logicians to do judging, not enthroning former lawyers) as well as providing a sample letter to the legislators to bring the issue of brazen judicial fraud (which is rampant in federal courts) to their attention.

This highly rational advice was censored out by the Daily Beast.

I wonder why…

Give this a listen, and ponder the question: why on Earth would Governor Christie of New Jersey want to replace his state’s judges? Why would he want to “remake the court in a more conservative image?”

If the judges were impartial, than what difference would it make who sits on the bench? Judges would have no preconceived notions of who should win and who should lose. They would impartially weigh parties’ argument, and then impartially give victory to the stronger one. Why would it matter that it is a Democrat Joe who’s doing this evaluation, or a Republican Jim, a conservative Mary or a liberal Jane? Facts and law adduced by the parties are same no matter who’s the judge; logic is a science, so the result of deducing whose argument is stronger should not vary depending on who’s examining the facts and applying the logic to them. The end result of the case should be exactly the same no matter who – a Republican or Democrat, a liberal or a conservative – is occupying the bench.

But as politicians like Gov. Christie know full well, this is not how judges work. While the powers that be want the public to believe in judicial impartiality so the system isn’t upended, judges do not operate in an impartial, logical, rational manner. They do not care about facts, and when they do apply the logic, they apply it to the facts they themselves invent, not those presented by the parties. “Judicial process” is utterly arbitrary, its result having nothing to do with what parties argued, but only with judges’ whim; this is why who’s on the bench makes all the difference in the world.

We get this lesson from the politicians every time there is a judicial nomination, yet we are unable to grasp its implications, which are as follows: judicial impartiality is a myth; parties’ argument makes no difference whatsoever; the exchange of motions is just for the show; judges neither serve the cause of justice, nor follow the law; “due process of the law” is but a legalized swindle; the only one who fully figured out the system is Kafka.

This lesson stares us in the face; yet our power of reason is so dimmed and subdued by social brainwashing that no matter how often this lesson is being repeated – and it is being repeated with every single judicial nomination – we just can’t get it. Bizarre!