The Supreme Court could soon deliver a blow to the Sixth Amendment (opens in new tab)

Since the rise of the labour movement, sending your kids to private schools has been largely seen as either a moral failing like in Switzerland, or an admission that your kid is so dumb that you need to buy them a diploma from somewhere else. For a very long time there were hardly any in Norway at all.

To take your example one step further: This same argument is part of the reason why in Norway there are heavy restrictions on private healthcare providers offering necessary services to the public - the public healthcare system has a near monopoly on this. Private providers can provide elective surgeries etc. like breast implants and other cosmetic surgery that is not (usually) covered by the public healthcare, but are mostly prevented from offering services covered by the public healthcare system.

Here the argument goes further: It will ensure everyone has an incentive to ensure the public healthcare is good enough. But it also will ensure that private actors are not substantially draining the public system of resources, such as e.g. doctors that are substantially subsidized by the public education system in the first place.

Basically going private is seen as immoral queue-jumping that will indirectly deprive more needing patients of treatment by reducing the available resources.

> known as "public" in Britain, to confuse us all

It's worse. Not all private schools are public schools. It is first and foremost used about some of the oldest, most exclusive private schools, but "public" here comes from being open to the (paying) public irrespective of e.g. religion or occupation or where you live contrary to e.g. private schools run by religious groups and similar.

The obvious counter example is the US, where public schooling is sectioned off by neighborhood and rich kids still attend school together because they can afford to live in their respective neighborhoods. Even worse, the US spends more money per child on public teaching, and still has some dreadfully bad public schools due to various inefficiencies.

In short, I think your assessment is backwards private college/lawyers/your-favourite-resource don't favor the rich, instead the rich build private college/lawyers/your-favourite-resource to favor themselves (or their children).

When there were no schools at all, wealthy English would have "private" tutors at home. Then schools became popular - one would go to a school with other rich children, which was "public" compared to home tutoring. When state funded schools arrived, they needed to distinguish between the phrase "public" school and "state funded" school.

In the USA, the concept of a "public" school was the norm by then, so they never bothered using "public" to distinguish them, so when state funded schools arrived private and public became the other way round.

So simply put, the USA was already a socialist paradise by the time they came to name their schools

This sort of precedent would only hurt the indigent or impoverished. Wealthy people have wealthy friends who will pay for their legal defense. Financing will be offered to the wealthy, allowing them to maintain access to disproportionate resources in their defense. The poor, not having access to social networks of wealthy friends or family will be screwed. It's bad enough having to get time off of work or find child-care for the poor and working-classes, now they won't have access to their meagre resources?

I wish society would do a better job of considering the ramifications of what is supposedly being accomplished by the adoption or pursuit of policies. "Equal playing field" is nice in theory but it took me a few seconds to realize that the wealthy would still be able to marshall considerable resources just like they already do, except that the poor won't.

I don't get it. Can you actually argue in court that because a particular outcome would be "unequal" in terms of access, that the services in question shouldn't be available to anybody? As far as I know, that's never been a viable argument. You have to satisfy a much stronger criteria for this sort of thing, that it's an actual public ill. Inequality, as far as I know, has never, by itself been sufficient to prove that.

[1] http://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcri...

"JUSTICE KAGAN: I might just be repeating myself, but ­­[...] I thought that, again, that distinction was the one specifically rejected in Monsanto."

The poor have no leverage, and realistically, no one is going to give that to them.

We're not talking about an idealistic re-working of civic values, but the natural tension that already exists between private interests and the public sector.

One need only look to antitrust law to see why letting any single locus of control grow unchecked can wreak havoc on a market/economy -- I think we should appreciate the few checks & balances we have left, lest this notion of naive idealistic equality allows them to slip away unchallenged.

If anyone here wants to argue that because the poor can't effectively fight government then nobody should be allowed to 'because otherwise it isn't fair', then please go ahead. But that's the logic of plucking out everyone's right eye because one person suffered an eye injury. If your idea of fairness is reducing everyone to the lowest common denominator, I want no part of it.

What this case is actually about is someone who allegedly defrauded Medicare. The state froze their assets so they could get back the stolen money after trial (it's frozen, not forfeit, so they have to find him guilty).

His lawyer (who is not a public defender, incidentally) argues that he had a lot of assets before the alleged fraud. But the response to that is that is that it's not really fair to let someone defraud Medicare and then declare their assets not subject to a freeze because they've spent all the stolen money. All that really does is incentivize thieves to spend the stolen money first and what good does that rule do? If you have $5,000, steal another $5,000, and then spend $5,000, why can't the state freeze your $5,000 whether you spent the stolen or non-stolen money? Is it really fair to let you hire a high-price lawyer that others could only dream of when the bulk of your funds come from fraud? Why does it matter which money they spent first?

You can find all this and more in the transcript of the oral argument: http://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcri...

The reality is that in many countries most lawyers don't earn very much, because they're not top end litigators or counsel to large companies, but spend most of their time writing "low value" documents or letters for clients with little money.

This doesn't seemed to have caused the supply of people wanting to study law to dry up.

The only thing extra you'd need as a criminal defense attorney is additional capital to start up your firm, and only for actual criminal case work. They have plenty of money, enough to wait for some time for a payday.

It's actually super common to wait years for payment in tons of industries, including law.

I'm explaining that law firms won't simply cease to exist if this case gets decided a certain way, which is what folks here seem to be implying. It's not an insurmountable hurdle.

Bill collection will adjust if it has to. Are you suggesting it won't?

He is not assuming guilt in this case. He is making the case for why not allowing freezing unrelated assets is a massively bad incentive which it is in the interest of justice to have counter-measures against.

If one believe countermeasures is necessary, it becomes a tradeoff between the necessity of such countermeasures vs. the negative impact they have on the innocent.

The bar for that is clearly quite high given that courts e.g. regularly will hold people without bail, or set huge bail amounts as countermeasures against having people run off.

In this case it is "only money", so it's not surprising that they court would consider it acceptable in general to freeze funds pending judgement compared to depriving someone of their freedom.

> Defendants then cannot hire the counsel they desire, lose their case and go to jail.

If the public defender system is not a good enough safeguard for justice, then that is an argument worth making, but the issue then is not the defendants ability to pick counsel, but that a substantial proportion of all defendants are forced to rely on a system that may be insufficient.

If you could convince the court that the public defender system is totally inadequate, that would be a strong case for unfreezing enough assets to get adequate representation, but still not necessarily enough to make the case for unfreezing enough for the counsel you might prefer (to take the extreme example: if you're guilty and could hire anyone what's to stop you from finding a suitable friend or relative who is a lawyer, and pay them every cent you own to defend you, as a means of moving the money out of reach?)

There are several negative consequences that arise out of being prosecuted for a crime. I don't think we can say that just because there are some constraints placed on defendants, they've been presumed guilty. If they were presumed guilty, they'd be immediately sentenced and forced to retroactively disprove the claims post-facto.

And if you go that route, then it's not at all fair that some people can hire expensive lawyers and others cannot to improve their chances. If someone defrauds Medicare for millions, why should they get an expensive lawyer for that when other people cannot afford them?

If everyone was forced to use public defenders, the powerful would use their influence to make sure that it provided effective, independent defense. Even so, it's not like getting an expensive lawyer somehow gets you off and a public defender guarantees you'll be found guilty.

But it does not seem reasonable that we should adopt rules to increase the unfairness by doing everything possible to remove any incentive to improve the public defender's office and doing our utmost to ensure that the poor are forever trapped with ineffective counsel.

Just for the record, this guy has a very expensive lawyer, not a public defender.

I could possibly see the spirit of the amendment better served if everyone were defended via the same public-defender system, regardless of income level. That would provide equal access to justice, and also provide middle-class and wealthy people an incentive to make sure it's actually properly funded, since it's the system that would defend them, not only poor people. I'm not sure if that's a better or worse interpretation of the letter of the constitution, though.

The current case seems to be arguing something different: that freezing defendant's assets that they could use to pay for counsel is a 6th amendment violation even assuming an effective public-defender system. That requires a separate right, something like: the right to pay for the best defense you can afford. Afaict, this is at the Supreme Court because they've never ruled either way on whether the 6th amendment includes such a right; the previous cases have focused on the minimum threshold for what constitutes effective assistance of counsel.

You don't have to own a car. (and in fact fewer and fewer people do) You also don't have to have auto insurance to own or drive a vehicle, just to drive it on public thoroughfares. Which, believe it or not, is not everyone's use case.