I pride myself in being an internet power user. I think I can research most things on the net very well. I’ve had to draft an Affidavit for the succession wars and so I thought “surely this is something I can discover on the net”
Ha!
I found definitions and some general (albeit useful) guidelines. But you’d think there would be an accessability site somewhere dedicated to enabling citizens to take control of their legal affairs. While I don’t think it is a conspiracy by the legal profession to protect their monopoly, the complexity and formality of the legal process is unjust and disenfranchises citizens.
Democracies should embrace accessability and root out practices and procedures that create obstacles to ordinary citizens participating in social, political and legal action.
Now that I’ve made such a high faluting statement, I don’t know how to simplify the process so typical high-school educated citizens can participate. I recall when selling books to prison libraries, the most requested subject was a criminal law textbook for a 4th grade reading age. Prisoners did not lack intelligence; they lacked education, vocabulary and articulation.
So back to writing affidavits, if it takes five years of university education, a law degree and two or three years experience in a legal practice to lay out evidence in a civil matter, something is broken.
Plain english law is the first step. What’s the next?
One response to “Writing Affidavits”
The best way to deal with this things is to sit down and write the chronology of what happened in your own words. Ie on 10th of December 2003 I met with x, he said x, I replied Z. Subsequently he sent me document A (here’s a copy it’s labelled “A1”).
Once the sequence of events is clear in your mind then you should attempt to write it down in numbered paragraphs. The numbering is helpful because you can cross refer (eg Based upon the statments Bil lmade to me at the meeting referred to in paragraph 15, I did blah blah blah.
Clear thinking and clear expression are what’s required. Unfortunately rare. You’re right though, it has nothing to do with intelligence, it’s a skill just like changing the oil in your car.