Human Justice by Human and the Lights
It’s an old adage that the only ones who really win lawsuits are the lawyers.
Maybe it’s because they are part of a system tilted more toward rewarding the ancillary participants, hired hands and corporate interests than the vulnerable, innocent victims who are smothered by the process.
That’s not lost on the lawyers, some of whom might look at themselves in the mirror and say they are not going to take it anymore.
One such lawyer, a human rights lawyer, currently goes by the name of Human and the Lights. He is also an author of a new book called Human Justice — and at the very beginning he acknowledges his stance.
He explains in the book’s prologue that he believed a particular client was a liar. The human value of honesty should have compelled him to withdraw as her lawyer. Instead, he settles the case and takes 40 percent of the award, plus $4,000 in costs.
As he says, “I’m only human.”
He says it apologetically, not proudly. But that word will soon take on another meaning in the course of this attorney’s narrative.
A Revolutionary Approach
“After Karen’s case, I tried to quit lawyering. Failing that, I tried something new and, as it turns out, revolutionary. I started treating potential new clients like humans.”
It was the first step in transforming his life.
For Human did indeed take on another case, which is documented in great detail in Human Justice. It is the matter of a worker at a paper company who reports a potential hazard, sees that nothing is done about it, and then suffers a serious injury as a result of the company’s neglect.
Then the man, Ted Brown, who becomes a thorn in the company’s side, is wrongfully terminated by the company, claiming, among other things, he was not showing up for work on certain days — days that, as it turns out, the company was not even open.
It was just another of example of what the author’s conscience was telling him to do.
“This was my last trial before leaving law to focus on leading with my heart,” writes the author. “I decided during the trial that it would be my last case, as I did not want to put another human through the abuse the corporate side piled on my client.”
“Most of my clients,” writes Human, “were financially poor. Fighting for poor folks harmed by corporate inequity opened my eyes to a grim reality: We live in an age controlled by and for corporations … And the sole criterion of corporate decision-making is maximizing profit. That’s it.”
Breaking Free from Corporate Chains
Human quits the field of law. So now what?
He dedicates much of the book to describing the inequities of corporate justice, whose basis is in dollar signs and often at the disregard for the person seeking justice in the first place. He does so from his experience in the legal system and the intricacies he exposed from a specific case, as well as from his general philosophical beliefs, which forced him to walk away.
But our society is wrapped up in the corporate way of things, and it’s hard for those sucked into it to break free – with Human being an exception.
Perhaps the character Morpheus, from the show “The Matrix,” says it best. And our author quotes him: “Most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”
Human calls corporatism a virus — one that causes potentially good people to malfunction.
The author would like to believe that human values like empathy, altruism, honesty and compassion — the idea of leading with our hearts — can overcome any poison of the corporate world.
In Human Justice, readers will be intrigued with the account of a human-rights court case and at the same time be presented with a plethora of philosophical nuggets reflecting one man’s take on our world and the struggle of the system vs. the real people who define it.
Yet in the end, his message is simple:
“Corporate values lead some humans to believe that they are better and more important than others. They are wrong. We’re all human. We’re all made of the same stuff.”
About Human and the Lights:
Human is a citizen of the multiverse. He takes joy and life and loves being out in nature. He gazes at the stars and sees himself dancing with them.
