Essential Function of legal process

What is a legal process?

A legal process is a formalized procedure by which civil or criminal proceedings are
instituted against a person or persons accused of wrongdoing. The purpose of a
legal process is to provide the accused with an opportunity to be heard and to give
them a fair chance to defend themselves, while also providing victims with a sense of
justice.

In criminal law, the legal process begins when the police investigate a crime and
gather evidence against the suspected perpetrator. If the police believe they have
enough evidence, they will then arrest the suspect and charge them with a crime. The
suspect will then appear in court, where they will be given the opportunity to plead
guilty or not guilty. If they plead not guilty, the case will go to trial, where a jury will
decide whether or not they are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

In civil law, the legal process begins when one party files a lawsuit against another
party. The lawsuit alleges that the defendant has wronged the plaintiff in some way
and seeks damages for those wrongs. The defendant must then respond to the
lawsuit, after which both parties will have an opportunity to present their evidence
and argue their case before a judge or jury. The judge or jury will then issue a verdict
in favor of either party

One distinguishing element of modern trials is the abandonment of reliance on divine

intervention in favor of modern empirical decision-making. Factual evidence, when
scrutinized, has supplanted the evidential value of supernatural signals.Eyewitness
testimony has replaced oath-taking by the accused. Gathering, filtering, and
considering evidence has evolved from an unstructured process to a disciplined
organization defined by comprehensive protocols and explicit regulations.

Consider that the first known jurors in criminal cases in Anglo-Saxon England were
made up of individuals from the local community who had direct knowledge of the
case and/or the accused's character. By the eighteenth century, a jury was
constitutionally banned from having direct knowledge of the facts of the case before it,
and it could only hear evidence filtered by exceedingly complex regulations and
brought using intricate processes.

The medieval trial was, for the most part, a short, informal process that was managed
by the parties to the dispute. However, attorneys predominate in modern trials as
well. These professionals, who are paid and well-trained to represent the parties in
the dispute, must deal with the plethora of intricacies present in substantive law as
well as the ever-complex rules of evidence and procedure.

The qualities of the legal process provide it with a particular level of

qualitative certainty. Let's discuss the key characteristics of the legal system:

1. Any legal process is primarily a human activity; activity of subjects, participants of

this or that type of legal process; activities carried out in time and space.

2. A legal process is a legal activity that involves both procedural and legal aspects.
All activities within the scope of the legal process must be carried out, and decisions
must be made in accordance with the rules provided in the appropriate procedural law
standards.

3. Legal process is a legal (juridicial) activity of a circle of subjects (participants of the

process) strictly defined by the legislator in the current regulatory legal acts.

4. A legal procedure is an organized, step-by-step process. "Relatively independent,

but at the same time consistently interrelatable stages of procedural activity, forming
this or that type of legal process in their systemic unity" is how the stages of the legal
process are understood.

5. A legal activity with specific objectives is called a legal procedure. Therefore, they
are either the process of creating new legal norms (the law-making process) or the
process of putting into practice already-existing substantive law norms (the right-
realization process).
Thus, a legal process is a strictly legal (procedural and legal) activity of the entities
specified in the law to create legal norms or to ensure the implementation of existing
standards of substantive law.

Alan Watson’s Interpretation of Legal Process

Along the way,Watson examines: the essential function of legal processes; the
essence, typical attributes, and particular virtues of law; the relationship between law,
order, and authority; the role of legal rules, and respect and obedience for law.

The Nature of Law therefore represents a very ambitious undertaking, for its central
aim is no less than to supplant prevalent legal theories with a novel approach that
retains what is valuable in its rivals without succumbing to their one-sidedness.

The only essential function of the legal process, according to Watson, is to inhibit
potential conflict by settling actual disputes. More specifically, this essential function
has three components: law serves to "institutionalise disputes, validate the decisions
given in the process and inhibit unregulated conflict."

In Watson's view, because order-rather than freedom, justice, or morality-is the

essence of law, legal rules do not inevitably reflect the political, social, and economic
needs and desires of the society as a whole or its ruling elite.

Watson's reservations about each of these possible meanings of "function," it is

surprising that, in the end, he embraces all three. "In this book," he declares, "I will
use the word 'function' not only to mean what an institution does, but to express the
idea of what an institution is intended to do, and can do." 59 Watson maintains that
his account of law and the legal process can be readily formulated in terms of each
approach, but emphasizes that he believes that human purpose is essential to
understanding social institutions
Watson is convinced that law has the one essential function of resolving disputes with
the specific object of inhibiting further unregulated conflict. The legal process may,
and typically does, fulfill other functions as well, but this is its sole essential
function.Watson reaches this conclusion by a process of elimination: six candidates
are considered, and all but one are rejected.

Some possible functions of a legal process are rejected because they do not apply to
international or primitive law; others are discarded because they do not apply to trial
by combat, and still others are thrown out because the characteristics of entire
classes of legal processes undercut the importance of certain functions. The one
function common to all of the legal processes Watson considered is that of resolving
disputes with the specific object of inhibiting further unregulated conflict.

Watson appears to confuse a necessary condition for the existence of something with
its essence. For example, he writes: "An essential function is defined as one whose
failure cannot be structured into the system or whose constant failure cannot be
accepted as tolerable." The presence of oxygen is a necessary condition of human life,
but is hardly its essence. Methodological essentialism, moreover, blurs the distinction
between essence and identification. A single feature, such as a set of fingerprints,
may serve to identify a particular person without defining his essence; such a feature
may be a consequence of his nature, rather than its essence.

For example, he writes: "An essential function is defined as one whose failure cannot
be structured into the system or whose constant failure cannot be accepted as
tolerable."

The presence of oxygen is a necessary condition of human life, but is hardly its
essence. Methodological essentialism, moreover, blurs the distinction between
essence and identification. A single feature, such as a set of fingerprints, may serve
to identify a particular person without defining his essence; such a feature may be a
consequence of his nature, rather than its essence

Watson's adoption of methodological essentialism, and the consequent narrowness of

his approach to the function of law, limit both the generality of his theory of law and
the validity of his conclusions. This is preeminently true with respect to his analysis of
the internal workings of legal systems. Where ·watson focuses on the
interrelationships among legal systems, however, his analysis and conclusions are
both thought-provoking and suggestive, though incomplete