Kleros: Breaking From Neoliberal Legal Systems

This article is a submission to the Original Works contest.

Growth of Legal Systems

The process of resolving disputes has remained relatively unchanged since the Ancient world. We have the accused, a judge, defense and a final judgement. Whether these elements need to fundamentally change is up for debate. But how they interact, and the forms they can take, change over time, often radically. Instead of kings as a judge, we have a specialized role. Instead of the king’s friends, or landed property owners, in the United States we rely on a randomized peer-jury system.

Despite changes of form, the core elements of resolving disputes remain quite traditional. The reliance on written laws to define an act as just or unjust, that is, compliance with enacted laws, draws from Rome. The question of precedent is derived from England’s monarchical system. We call this common law. Most legal systems today maintain a combination of these two traditions, compliance and precedent.
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Since the 1970s and the growth of neoliberalism has in term come the growth of the tertiary sector. Defined as the service sector, the United States outsourced much of its secondary sector (manufacturing) to be replaced with services. One aspect of this service economy is the legal system. Since this time, the United States has seen immense growth in the legal system.

"We may well be on our way to a society overrun by hordes of lawyers, hungry as locusts, and brigades of judges in numbers never before contemplated." —Chief Justice Warren E. Burger:

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Redundancy

Despite this immense growth of the legal system and its technicians (lawyers), society has become more obtuse, more exclusionary. The redundancy of lawyers requires them to seek out their own reason of existence. Instead of making things easier, the process of resolving disputes becomes more expensive, more complex, and more reliant on outdated methods.
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Add to this the dimension of a globalized system of contracts and businesses, often decentralized and untraditional. With the rise of neoliberalism has come the normalization of temp work. Criticisms of the practice aside (cough, no unions or worker’s protections, cough), it’s a reality. And the ability for a globalized, atomized workforce to defend itself, let alone hire legal counsel, leaves them ready to be exploited.

Opportunity for Kleros

Herein comes Kleros. Far from being another anachronistic and exclusionary system of obtuse law, Kleros is a decentralized system of resolving contract disputes, whether they be mundane to highly complex.

Kleros enables specialized experts to fill-in, on demand, as jurors. The arbitration system is engaged when either party of a contract demands it, allowing them to choose the number of jurors to the type of court. The system empowers a global workforce, the legal jurisdiction of which is highly complex or even nonexistent, to be able to engage in contract disputes. The opt-in nature of the system not only empowers experts to weight in their opinions on a contract dispute, but greatly accelerates the process of resolving a dispute. Instead of waiting for the snail-paced system of incredibly expensive lawyers to wage a war of semantics, experts in their respective field can opt-in immediately as jurors, examine the evidence produced by either party, and make a decision.

The potential here could be groundbreaking. Though the general forms of judge, jury and defendants remain the same, the process by which the dispute it mediated takes a radical change. Instead of national boundaries and their reflective legal systems, Kleros represents a global legal method with the speed and ease-of-use of blockchain tech. The judge is the automated system itself. Informal workers, once excluded, whether financially or structurally, from being able to defend themselves from exploitative contracts and work conditions, can now use blockchain tech to ensure contracts are just and their conditions are met.

More Information & Resources:
Kleros Website
Kleros WhitePaper
Kleros Medium

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