Nils Christy's Conflict As Property

The paper published in The British Journal of Criminology by Nils Christy, “Conflict as Property”, stresses the idea that highly industrialized societies have built a process in which the individuals involved are isolated from their own conflicts and it is stolen by legal professionals. The author lists three major parties that take away victim and offender’s participation rights at their own court hearing. As a solution, essay discuses the two ideal court systems that would assist the restoration of conflicts to their rightly involved parties. Christy, at the end of the essay, lists challenges that interfere with the operation of such systems to work in the western world. In the first part of the essay, author starts off by giving an example …show more content…
Now, conflicts only belong to lawyers in that society, as they get to decide its fate and how to use it against other people. By structural thieves, it is mentioned to societal behavior, isolation based on categorizing and its big impact on control over people’s conflicts. Society’s values and inner working play a big role in deciding which rights people should be able to have and maintain. Government officials at a court trial also contributes to parties who steal conflict from the directly involved people. The paper emphasizes the idea that victims and offenders in a trial lose the opportunity to participate at their own conflict resolution. It is not the victim who explains the injustice done to them, but it has become the Crown’s job to do so and also be at the spotlight. Similarly, it is not the offender who gets to decide what relevant facts to winning the case, it is up to lawyers. In both cases, what belonged to them is removed and they have lost the opportunities that should have been theirs alone from the beginning. The author argues that society needs a court process that makes it possible for the involved parties to participate in resolution of their own conflicts. Even though this article was written almost forty years ago, the relevance of authors arguments to the society we live in today is huge and this comes to show that, conflict being treated as property has not changed since then. The purpose of this essay is to put more spotlight to the issue of conflict being taken away and treated as an object by legal professionals, which in turn is making individuals inactive in standing up for their rights. This notion has gotten unnoticed by everyday population, since the general idea of how law works. Many scholars have brought