Overview
- 3L’s ultimate goal is that the law applies equally to everyone using at least a reasonable interpretation of the Legal Principle and with due process.
- The 3L Philosophy does not prescribe precisely how the Legal Principle is implemented, enforced, or adjudicated. There are multiple ways to accomplish these critical and necessary functions; no one approach will achieve perfection.
- Local communities may opt to separate the three branches of governance as a key defense against abuse of power.
The three branches of governance
- Government is commonly divided into three branches:
- The legislature (lawmakers; those who draft laws consistent with the Legal Principle for the local community),
- The executive (law enforcement), and
- The judiciary (courts).
- A jury is an excellent way to safeguard against potential judicial overreach. Particularly in criminal court trials, a jury brings community judgment into the legal process, ensuring that verdicts reflect shared community values by allowing ordinary citizens to check the power of the prosecutor in criminal proceedings. Whether jurors should be entirely untrained or receive some formal education and training is a matter left for local communities to determine.
- Separating these three branches, along with checks and balances, is widely considered necessary for maintaining a free society.
- A threat to this three-branch model is when judges create law, a phenomenon known as judicial activism. However, when a higher court finds that a law infringes on a person’s freedom and invalidates it, this is not making law, but rather serving as an appropriate watchdog of the legislature. In a society where the law follows the Legal Principle, an indispensable role of the judiciary is invalidating all laws that do not follow the Legal Principle.