A surprising letter from a court in northern Germany:
“Dear Mr. Raimer, The attached legal document is submitted for your information. We regret that it has not been submitted in a timely manner. With kind regards…”
I am speechless. The legal document forwarded by the court was dated 09/13/2012. Yes – that’s 2012, not 2013! The document took an unbelievable 15 months to reach us. The terse comment that the document had not been sent “in a timely manner” was putting it extremely politely. Was this a rare exception?
A while ago I had to lodge a request for documents relating to preliminary injunction proceedings with a court in the Rhineland. After a few weeks had passed without receiving them, I phoned the court and was told that the employee responsible for this had collected quite a large number of documents from various proceedings into an unsorted stack of papers about 5 feet tall. After thinking up this creative filing system, the employee was, of course, taken ill for an extended period of time. As such, the substitute employee filling in simply could not tell me where the documents I requested were.
Judges are indeed known for being great at telling other people what “due diligence” looks like or when people are faced with “corporate negligence”. And for the last few years “vicarious liability” – especially in internet law – is increasingly taking hold; this means that internet service operators are regularly held liable for illegal activities that some users of their services have engaged in, simply because the operators had allegedly failed to exercise “reasonable standards of care”. Perhaps judges should make occasional use of this accumulated knowledge of how people are meant to organize their operating procedures to clean up their own pigsty.
Of course pigsty is a strong word. And I will probably wind up talking myself into a rage. But these unequal standards at play here really upset me. Why should the average person or company be expected to do so much more than state authorities? And so I will end this post with a quote by Molière:
“One ought to look a good deal at oneself before thinking of condemning others.”
