John Buttrick is presently serving as a United States Magistrate Judge for the District of Arizona. His areas of concentration are criminal pretrial procedure and civil mediation. John was appointed in 2012 following almost 12 years of service as an Arizona Superior Court Judge in Maricopa County working in the Civil, Criminal and Family Law Departments. Before he was elevated to the bench, Judge Buttrick practiced complex civil litigation for 25 years as a partner in a Phoenix based law firm after attending Harvard Law School from which he graduated in 1976.

Topic  (Freedom Summit): Libertarian Legal Systems: Utopia or Self-Contradiction? For many decades those in the freedom movement have contemplated what kind of legal system, if any,  would be appropriate in a libertarian or anarcho-capitalist society. Many solutions have been posed to answer the question of how justice would be served in the criminal and civil arenas after the government has been severely pruned back or eliminated. Arbitration, mediation, ostracism, insurance, restitution and private justice systems of many stripes have been posited along with the remedy of elimination of all jurisprudential mechanisms. On one extreme, some have advocated for a system quite close to our present one, albeit with sharply limited substantive and procedural jurisdiction and powers. Others have argued for no governmental role at all predicting that wholly private competing systems would appropriately resolve all disputes. In this presentation, Judge Buttrick will survey the thinking in this area over the course of the last several decades and offer some insights and criticism bound to stimulate conversation and further inquiry.

 

Click Here to Register for the Freedom Summit 2014!