The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
     Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
     For promis’d joy!

Robert Burns, “To a Mouse”

There’s an old saying: “the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” It comes from the poem excerpted above. The poem is about a farmer who accidentally destroys a mouse’s home while plowing a field. In the poem, the line has two meanings. The mouse’s best plans and hopes are ruined by the farmer, who she could neither predict nor control. But the farmer’s plans, too, have gone awry—thinking on the level of the field, the farmer’s actions had consequences that he did not intend. In the poem, the farmer apologizes not only for his mistake, but for the fact that the big ideas of humans have broken the trust among those who share this earth.

This semester, we’ve been examining the “justice” part of the American criminal justice system. We’ve been exploring the difficulties of turning “justice”—an abstract, complex moral concept—into a system of laws and people and politics, each with its own complexities. And in Mistrial, we’ve seen how in the courtroom, some of the big ideas that drive the system of criminal justice have (at least in Geragos and Harris’s opinion) gone far awry indeed.

For Writing Project 2, I’d like us to return to the philosophies of justice that we explored in Project 1. We’ll use those one of those philosophies to explore the and examine the problems pointed out in Mistrial.