Manifesto
Higher Quality Law
No one is an island, and to make the most of our lives, we need a community greater than the sum of its parts; we need a powerful, effective civil society that multiplies our strength in unity by leveraging the distinctness of our diversity.
Diversity multiplies our strength as the diversity of organs in our bodies is more than the sum of our parts; the orchestra accords our adaptability, resilience, and individual power. But all this diversity is governed by a plan, a script, and rules called DNA.
As DNA governs the diversity within each of us, in a powerful, effective civil society, we need a plan, a script, and rules to govern our diversity. Our law is the DNA of a civil society.
Just as quality DNA produces a healthy body, and defective DNA leads to a sick body, quality law produces a healthy society, while defective law produces a sick society.
Just as DNA evolves to progress through the survival of the fittest, so must the law progress to ensure the increasing fitness of society, the society that serves each of us.
“The Arc of the Moral Universe is Long, But it Bends Toward Justice”
— Martin Luther King Junior, 1968
The reason it bends towards justice is that survival of the fittest selects in favour of justice, in favour of higher quality justice. But, unlike DNA, justice evolves much faster, largely due to people with a better understanding of justice, such as Martin Luther King Junior, who had a dream…
But justice is not a straight path; it meanders, goes backward, goes forward, and seems to be painfully illogical at times. Often, quality justice seems ephemeral, and what do we even mean by words such as justice and quality?
Historically, justice and law have been defined by politics and religion, and this history records the influence of such experience on our sense of justice and our codex of the law.
The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, The Common Law, 1881
What is missing from the law is the influence of logic, science, and engineering, the deliberate pursuit of truth, understanding, and quality.
The vision of the Legal Watchdog Institute is
higher quality law
To realize this vision, one of the institute's objectives is to attempt to replace politics and religion with science and engineering as the influencing agency, bending the moral universe more deliberately towards justice. To leverage science better to engineer the DNA of a quality civil society.
