#roderick_long

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The use of juries in trials is obviously intended to ensure a trial by one's peers, or by a fair representation of one's country. But what if the jurors are overwhelmingly white, in the trial of a Black man?

Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) think tank commentator Roderick Long slammed the use of jurors selected by government-appointed prosecutors as a way of ensuring biases and unfair trials rather than preventing them. In a society as heterogeneous as the US, there is a constant risk of interference from racist prejudices in any search for justice. As Long emphasizes, "the government’s practice in many southern jurisdictions of excluding blacks from juries is especially troubling, and raises questions about the practice of peremptory challenge itself", when one considers how Black people have consistently been disproportionately targeted by US law enforcement. Referencing the ideas of US abolitionist Lysander Spooner, Roderick Long advocates in his 22 October post that the solution is an autonomous legal system in the US, independent of the influence and control of government-appointed prosecutors. Trial by one's peers should be maintained as a function of civil society, therefore, instead of the state. Further emphasis is placed on making juries perhaps more representative of the larger society, including representing views and ethnicities that government may not have been comfortable with. An example of such reform may be to appoint jurors who hold an unfavorable view of law enforcers or who do not recognize the US regime's authority (who may in fact account for the majority of Americans). A further reform may be to ensure that the proportion of Black people appointed on any jury must be roughly analogous to their proportion in the state or neighborhood in question.

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GOP politicians favoring Donald Trump's idea of a wall between the United States and Mexico have forgotten why the Berlin Wall was wrong.

Roderick Long at the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) argued in a post on 27 July that Republicans have "learned to love" the Berlin Wall and see it as justifiable for a state to impose totalitarian restrictions on movement on its citizens. This is coming from the same Republican ideologues who idolize and (in the case of Jeffrey Lord who is mentioned in the post) worked for Ronald Reagan, who decried state-imposed walls as totalitarian and fundamentally against liberty. The C4SS post noted that Jeffrey Lord was correct about one important thing: there is no moral difference between a regime denying migrants the right to enter its borders and a regime refusing to allow its citizens to migrate. In both cases, the post argues, the state is acting as an unwelcome third party interfering in the liberties both of foreigners and its own citizens (who may either wish to depart, or allow migrants into their country). In its conclusion, Long's analysis calls for the abandonment of borders and walls of all kinds in favor of a world with more freedom of movement. In many ways, absolute freedom of movement and absolute freedom of circulation of property and information are all facets of late modernity and are inevitabilities of technology. Since the formation of nation-states upon national telegraphic and rail links, such polities have become untenable because of inexorable pressures from modern technology and communication infrastructure including the Internet and social media itself.

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