Manifesto · Legal-system reform

Everyone Lawyer

Break the legal monopoly. Open the courtroom black box. A former Chinese law professor's case for taking justice out of a closed profession and returning it to ordinary people.

Justice belongs to We the People.

Filed by a litigant. Sixteen years a law professor and practicing lawyer in China; today a licensed landscape contractor in the United States. Written after losing a civil case he still believes he should have won.

Statement of the complainant

I admired the American legal system almost beyond measure. Then I went to court.

I was a law professor and practicing lawyer in China for 16 years. Before immigrating to the United States, I admired the American legal system almost beyond measure. I believed that America's Constitution, Declaration of Independence, separation of powers, and commitment to individual liberty had created the greatest legal system in human history.

In 2024, however, I brought a civil action against my former business partner for alleged theft, embezzlement, and fraud. I possessed approximately 500 pages of evidence that I considered solid, compelling, and more than sufficient to prevail in China. Yet I lost the entire case after encountering what I viewed as profound procedural absurdity, professional irresponsibility, and institutional failure.

The experience was a nightmare. My admiration for the American legal system collapsed.

With my legal background in China and my direct experience as an American litigant, I came to recognize that the American legal system contains structural defects that are contrary to common sense, human dignity, democracy, and justice.

Fourteen structural failures

An itemized complaint against the machinery of litigation.

Count 01 – 14 · entered for the record

Litigation is so expensive that justice is beyond the financial reach of most ordinary people. A person may possess the truth and overwhelming evidence but still be unable to afford the lawyer, discovery, depositions, experts, transcripts, motions, and appeals necessary to present the case.

The judge may exercise nearly dictatorial power inside the courtroom — the very place where liberty and equality should receive their strongest protection. Judicial independence is necessary, but independence without real-time transparency and effective accountability can become unchecked power.

Legal professionals have constructed a deep procedural moat between We the People and justice. They control legal representation, courtroom procedure, legal interpretation, and professional discipline. The public is expected to obey a system it cannot reasonably understand, navigate, or afford.

American civil procedure is unnecessarily complicated and confusing. Simple factual disputes can be transformed into years of discovery battles, evidentiary objections, technical motions, deadlines, and procedural games. The machinery of litigation can become more important than the truth the machinery was supposedly created to discover.

Lawyers, judges, and bar associations operate within a privileged professional circle whose members share common institutional interests. When the same profession controls access, procedure, interpretation, and discipline, the appearance — and sometimes the reality — of mutual protection becomes unavoidable.

Business owners are deprived of meaningful litigation rights because a corporation generally cannot represent itself through its owner. The justification may sound reasonable in theory, but the practical result is irrational and destructive: a business may be forced to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on attorneys even when the dispute itself is relatively small. A business can be driven into bankruptcy before the court ever decides who is right.

Courtrooms are kept unnecessarily opaque. Judges can restrict audio and video recording, preventing the public from creating a complete and objective record of what judges, attorneys, witnesses, and litigants actually say and do.

Too many legal professionals become arrogant, irresponsible, or indifferent because the people who depend upon them have few realistic alternatives. When clients submit legitimate complaints, disciplinary institutions may appear more concerned with protecting the profession than protecting the public.

The American legal establishment increasingly resembles the eunuch system of imperial China: a closed and privileged circle controlling access, information, and power while producing little independent value. It consumes enormous social resources through motions, objections, depositions, hearings, and mountains of documents, yet it often fails to discover truth or deliver justice efficiently.

Meaningful checks and balances are weakest inside the courtroom. Judges may exercise enormous authority over property, businesses, families, liberty, and human lives, while appeals remain expensive, slow, technical, and incapable of repairing much of the damage already done.

The legal system does not consistently promote productivity. It can obstruct American innovation, science, technology, and entrepreneurship by consuming the money, attention, and energy of the very people who create value for society.

Legal professionals have become a unique source of suppression over We the People. Through their exclusive control of legal practice, they can determine who may speak effectively, who may represent a business, what evidence may be considered, and whether an ordinary person will ever receive a meaningful hearing.

The system wastes overwhelming amounts of valuable social resources while disproportionately benefiting the professionals who operate it.

Litigation too often becomes a game of manipulation and strategy — a contest for profit, reputation, and victory — rather than an honest search for truth and justice.

Relief sought — two remedies

Two revolutionary but practical principles.

Remedy One

End the legal monopoly.

The first solution is to end the legal profession's exclusive monopoly over legal assistance and representation.

Everyone should have the right to understand the law, defend personal rights, represent an owned business, and obtain assistance from a trusted and capable person — even when that person is not a licensed attorney. Licensed lawyers may continue to practice, but they should have to compete on quality, knowledge, ethics, efficiency, and results.

After coming to America, I became a licensed landscape contractor. In the contracting market, customers have alternatives: they may perform certain work themselves, compare providers, hire specialists, or choose among competing licensed contractors. Competition compels responsible contractors to improve their workmanship, technology, service, efficiency, and integrity.

Lawyers, by contrast, are protected by a judge-enforced moat. When a capable nonlawyer attempts to help himself or another person, the legal establishment can simply declare it the unauthorized practice of law and order that person to stop. The public is then forced back into the same expensive professional system.

This arrangement is unfair, unreasonable, and contrary to both science and free-market principles. If lawyers are genuinely more knowledgeable and capable, they should prove their value through open competition — not through laws that prohibit competitors from entering the field.

Opening legal practice would not eliminate professional lawyers. It would compel them to become better, more ethical, more affordable, and more responsive to the people they serve, just like competitive contractors.

Remedy Two

Destroy the courtroom black box.

The second solution is transparency.

Except in a limited category of cases involving children, genuine privacy interests, or public safety, every person should be permitted to record courtroom proceedings using an ordinary camera or telephone.

America has avoided many forms of tyranny because journalists and citizens can scrutinize public officials at little cost. But judges remain substantially insulated from that public scrutiny because they can prohibit recording and threaten violators with contempt.

I personally experienced the consequences of this system. When I attempted to speak at a hearing, the judge told me that I had to speak through my lawyer. But my loss, in my view, resulted substantially from incapable and unethical legal representation. How can people be required to surrender their voices to professionals whom they no longer trust?

Courts may argue that proceedings are already transparent because court reporters can create transcripts. That is not sufficient. Court reporters work repeatedly within the court system, and their expensive services remain beyond the reach of many litigants. A written transcript also cannot fully preserve tone, pauses, facial expressions, interruptions, or the complete atmosphere of a hearing.

Without independent recording, the courtroom remains a black box, and the judge remains its controlling operator. The easiest, cheapest, and most democratic way to open that black box is to allow We the People to record judicial proceedings directly. If judges act fairly and attorneys speak truthfully, recordings will protect them. If a witness is misquoted, a litigant is silenced, or the record is distorted, recordings will preserve the truth.

Public power must be exercised in public view.

New evidence · Artificial intelligence

The old excuse is over.

Defenders of the current monopoly will argue that law is too complicated and sophisticated for ordinary people. One year ago, I might have agreed. I do not agree anymore.

Artificial intelligence has changed the foundation of this argument. AI can examine statutes, compare evidence, identify contradictions, organize records, analyze judicial decisions, and expose errors that human legal professionals may overlook.

In my own case, the court relied upon a cited decision by quoting an argument that the cited decision itself rejected. The authority therefore undermined the very proposition for which it was used. None of the legal professionals involved identified this contradiction. I discovered it as a litigant with the assistance of AI.

AI does not make every person infallible, nor does it eliminate the need for human judgment. But it destroys the claim that legal knowledge must remain the exclusive property of a licensed professional class. It can break the hierarchy of knowledge — placing legal research, analysis, organization, and advocacy within the reach of ordinary people. It can make what was once impossible possible.

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