Hi,

I don't know if it's quite what you want, but in Monument by Lloyd
Biggle Jr.
a civil court case takes place. It's adversarial, with two lawyers
arguing and a
judge presiding, but from memory the judge's role is just to see that it is
conducted correctly and the lawyers do not argue as such. All their
arguments,
based on precedents, have to be formally written up before hand on computer
readable chits, then they present them to a legal computer which determines
validity and priority and cancels out arguments that are overthrown by
opposing
ones. The winner is the one who has an argument still standing after the
opposition have presented all theirs.

Cheers,
Jim

On 09/10/2020 12:06, Jeff Zeitlin wrote:
> In my next Jotting, I want to discuss trials, both civil and criminal. I
> have a decent amount of information on some of the basic forms of a trial,
> but what I have quite naturally applies only to Earth history and present
> practice.
>
> What I'd like from the Group Mind is pointer to examples in SF of civil or
> criminal "trials" that are at variance from the "standard forms" of
> Adversarial, Inquisitorial, Combat, or Ordeal.
>
> An example would be the trial by Gowachin Law in Frank Herbert's _The
> Dosadi Experiment_, which is superficially an Adversarial "bench trial"
> (before judges, not a jury), but where the assumptions, rules, and
> procedures are significantly different from the expected norms.
>
> Another example might be the Court of Political Justice on New Texas in H.
> Beam Piper's _Lone Star Planet_, where in form it is a standard Common
> Law/Adversarial trial of the accused, but in substance, it is in fact a
> trial of the victim.
>
> I have no objection to examples not originally written in English; it is
> not, in my opinion, unlikely that such fiction is more likely to portray
> alternatives based on the Civil Law/Inquisitorial system, as many countries
> use that system - none of which speak English as a primary language.
> However, I'd want pointers to English translations of anything longer than
> a short story (the various on-line translators are generally pretty good -
> but copy-paste-copynextchunk-paste-etc. can get tedious).
>
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