The adversarial legal system is traditionally praised for its normative appeal: it protects individual rights; ensures an equal, impartial, and consistent application of the law; and, most importantly, its competitive structure facilitates the discovery of truth – both in terms of the facts, and in terms of the correct interpretation of the law. At the same time, legal representation is allocated as a commodity, bought and sold in the market: the more one pays, the better legal representation one gets. In (...) this article, I argue that the integration of a market in legal representation with the adversarial system undercuts the very normative justifications on which the system is based. Furthermore, I argue that there are two implicit conditions, which are currently unmet, but are required for the standard justifications to hold: that there is (equal opportunity for) equality of legal representation between parties, and that each party has (equal opportunity for) a sufficient level of legal representation. I, therefore, outline an ideal proposal for reform that would satisfy these conditions. (shrink)

I offer a novel distinction between two concepts of competition. The first, parallel competition, is designed to create separate pathways for each competitor wherein they can maximize their performance. The second, friction competition, is designed to facilitate a clash between competitors. Each concept is utilized as an institutional mechanism to generate social benefits. In parallel competition, the social benefit is the result of the aggregation of the independent efforts of each competitor. In friction competition, it emerges from the clash between (...) competitors. I argue that this distinction carries significant normative implications concerning debates over equality, freedom, and democratic institutional design. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es defender el valor normativo de un principio de igualdad de oportunidades para influir políticamente en contra de un principio que las distribuya de manera desigual pero beneficiando a los peor situados. Para ello, se muestra que la influencia política es un bien de un tipo especial que permite rechazar la objeción de la nivelación hacia abajo y que la igualdad política, aunque pueda ser derrotada por consideraciones epistémicas, es absolutamente necesaria para criticar aspectos inequitativos (...) de una distribución desigual. The main objective of this article is to defend the normative value of a principle of equal opportunities to politically influence against a principle which distributes them unequally but improving the least advantaged position. In order to do that, the article argues that political influence is a special kind of good which is able to reject the leveling down objection and that political equality, although it could be defeated by epistemic considerations, preserves a prima facie value. (shrink)