Tag Archives: law

Jury summons

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I was due to go to court this morning for a jury summons. Last night I checked my personal email before bed to learn that it was canceled. It’s a bit of a relief for me because this is not a great time to miss work and the summons was for a 20 day criminal trial.

Like voting, I think that being summoned for jury duty is a civil duty. To participate in a free and just society, you need to support the political and judicial systems that make that society work. But I can’t imagine having to leave a job for 20 or more working days.

Perhaps there should be incentives for retired people to be jurors? I don’t know how you would design this to be fair, but I will say that I’d be much more willing to do my civic duty as a juror when I don’t have to worry about missing work. More than fixing that, I wonder if there isn’t a way to make the whole process shorter? What parts of a case in a law court could use a revamp in design and process so courts cases are less drawn out and more to the point? I honestly have no idea, but I think this is a question that’s worth looking into.

“The purpose of a system is what it does.”

I just went back to my very first blog post, originally written on March 29th, 2006, and added with a reflection to DavidTruss.com 2 years later. “The purpose of a system is what it does.”

First of all, it’s hard to believe that I’ve been blogging for 16 years! At the time of my reposting this first post onto my own website, I wrote about my 2 year journey to that point, “As I approach the two year mark since first blogging this, I can honestly say that becoming a blogger has been absolutely transformative! I feel like I’ve learned more in the past 2 years than I have in 22 years of one kind of institutional learning or another.“

Now going back to the point of that post, I wonder what the purpose of our current systems are?

Social media seems to be about gaining and keeping attention at any cost.

Governments seem to be about managing risk in wasteful ways.

Law seems to be about expensive litigation with justice sometimes prevailing.

Education seems to be about ranking students for university.

Higher education seems to be about putting students into debt to pay for credentials.

Of course there are exceptions, shining examples of how things could be. But how many of our systems do things that, if you look at them you think, that’s not the purpose of that system? And if the results aren’t what we want, if our systems keep giving us unintended results, at what point do we recognize that these results are the purpose of our systems? And then, what do we do about getting to the real, intended purposes?