21 reasons you won't get justice from the adversarial court system

11. Adversarial ethics. Ethics invented by lawyers are self-contradictory. Lawyers purport to have a duty not to deceive the court, but also claim to have a sacred duty to get the best result for the client. If the client is in the wrong, the best result is to win the case; if he is guilty, the best result is to get him off. Both results necessarily deceive the court and pervert justice. The ethics have three other curious effects on lawyers:

12. Conscience-free lawyering. Law professor Murray Schwartz: "… a lawyer … is neither legally, professionally, nor morally accountable for the means used or the ends achieved." Sydney psychiatrist Dr Beth O'Brien: "That sounds like psychopathy." Psychopaths have no conscience.

13. Schizophrenia. Law professor Charles Wolfram: "[Lawyers are] institutionally schizophrenic ... a lawyer's objective within the system is to achieve a result favourable to the lawyer's client, possibly despite justice, the law and the facts."

14. Serial mendacity. Lawyer Charles Curtis: "One of the functions of a lawyer is to lie for his client. … He is required to make statements as well as arguments which he does not believe in." Ethics professor Arthur Applbaum: "Lawyers might accurately be described as serial liars because they repeatedly try to induce others to believe in the truth of propositions, or in the validity of arguments, that they believe to be false."

15. Legal aid. A device which makes taxpayers pay lawyers to lie and pervert justice.

16. Tax injustice. Lord Tomlin's enduring lie in the Duke of Westminster's case (1936) - "Every man is entitled if he can to order his affairs so that the tax attaching under the appropriate Act is less than it would otherwise be" - means that only those taxed at source are obliged to pay for the upkeep of judges, courts, hospitals etc.

17. Judicial perversion. A judge sitting alone is obliged to pervert justice when rules for suppressing relevant evidence make her conceal (from herself) compelling evidence and then find a criminal not guilty.

18. Double jeopardy. The common law says wrong guilty verdicts can be wrong, but wrong not guilty verdicts cannot be wrong.

19. The appellate lottery. David Goldberg QC: "… virtually every case which goes to the House of Lords could be decided either way." Harold Clough, engineer: "Tossing a coin has great advantages. It is quick, it is cheap, it is decisive, and in my view equally fair as any court case."

20. Litigation as a cancer. Judge Learned Hand: "… as a litigant I should dread a lawsuit beyond almost anything else short of sickness and death." John McCabe, 49, teacher, died in 2002 of a heart attack said to have been caused by the stress of his wife's litigation with a tobacco company.

21. Moral bankruptcy. Judge Burton Katz: "A system that exalts a criminal's rights over the victim's, procedure over substance, and adversarial supremacy over the quest for truth and justice is on the verge of moral bankruptcy. It will not survive, because the people will not support it."