A judicial system that cannot hear cases and deliver fair,
decisive, and timely results weakens social bonds and can sow
distrust and disfavour of the government. What can lawyers and
litigants do to help?
In Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, a
contemporaneous account of the vicious war between the enemy
city-states of Athens and Sparta in the 5th century
B.C., Thucydides writes of a plague which tore through Athens,
killing a third of the population, or 75,000-100,000 people. He
described a disease so virulent and causing so many deaths that
there was no record of anything like it ever before.1 In
one of his more searing passages, he wrote, "Words indeed fail
one when one tries to give a general picture of this disease; and
as for the sufferings of individuals, they seemed almost beyond the
capacity of human nature to endure."2
