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Law-Fit
- Steph Turner
- Jan 22
- 12 min read
Updated: Jan 24
The law can only do so much. Need-response takes us beyond minimal legal standards to respond directly to the needs our laws exist to serve. In other words, we ensure our flexible laws fit our inflexible needs.
CONTENTS
Why would you need law-fit?
The problem of toxic legalism
Asserting the greater authority of properly resolved needs
Responding to needs over mindless obedience
Applying the praise sandwich format
Use this simple ABC template
Example from real life
Do it yourself with peer support
Law-Fit professional support
Need-response offers this service of law-fit to introduce you to this new way to improve your wellbeing. When anyone cites some law or informal social norm, you have them state the need they expect that standard to address.
Law-fit: linking a norm with a need to be served.
Law-fit serves as an entry level for a much more thorough process of "citationization".
Citationization: process to link flexible norms to accountably serve inflexible needs.
After doing everything you can to obey the law, you can still find yourself in trouble. Perhaps some lawyer has convinced a court that you are in the wrong, despite the independent fact you are clearly in the right.
To start small, this service focuses first on the wrongly convicted innocent. Have you—or someone you love—been falsely accused and convicted of a crime? Perhaps they were not even there. Or no crime even occurred. Are you fully innocent and not yet exonerated?
Are you—or your loved one—unable to get a lawyer to reverse the conviction in court? Are you disillusioned with the legal process? Are you disillusioned with the innocence movement?
As this gains ground helping the innocent overcome injustice, it can expand to serve others strangled by the adversarial legal process. For example, those denied insurance coverage for a legal technicality. Or those unduly denied their rights by any aspect of the adversarialist legal system.
Are you ready to give up on the adversarialism of the broken legal system? Are you open to a fresh alternative? Can you see yourself pioneering a new approach of mutual respect for each other’s needs?
Law-fit radically changes gears. You shift from failing adversarialism to mutual engagement of each other’s needs. Yo directly address the needs our laws ostensibly exist to serve. You break free from
mindless compliance to fallible laws
to embrace
engaging responsiveness to each other’s inflexible needs.
Law-fit raises the standard. It holds authorities accountable to the inflexible needs they affect. It shifts from easily contorted legal arguments to the independent accountability of measurable wellness outcomes.
You fit the purpose of law to serve each other's needs over passively serving the law itself. It prioritizes everyone's inflexible needs over flexible laws. Use it to overcome the privileged problem of toxic legalism.
Reliance on laws to address your needs only takes you so far. Laws reek of imperfection. The imperfect institutions we trust to create and enforce them slip easily into costly errors.
Need-response identifies and counter five costly errors built into the human laws. Each starts with a benign purpose. Then slips into a painful problem we often overlook.
Laws hold us personally accountable for our actions. But risks neglecting the socioenvironmental contexts challenging our needs.
Laws emerge from rational authority. But risks suppressing the rich emotional content of our experiences of needs under a shroud of disingenuous rationalizations.
Laws remain intentionally vague to apply to a wide array of circumstances. But risks privileging exaggerations that avoid dealing with the messy details of our complicated lives.
Laws remain impersonal to apply equally to everyone. But risks alienating us from each other to the point we no longer personally engage each other.
Laws compel compliance by opposing violators with harsh punishments. But risks objectifying you as a presumed offender to the point of opposing the needs you cannot change.
No law is necessary wherever a need fully resolves on its own. For example, no law proves necessary to compel individuals to breathe properly. Or to compel you to drink enough water to function properly.
Laws can restrict how you access your water. Laws forbid you from stealing water from your neighbor's well. But no law can forbid you from requiring water. Or from requiring friendship. Or from requiring solitude. No law can legitimately negate your need for security, or for self-determination. If they do, need-respose asserts the higher authroity of properly resolving needs.
To properly resolve your needs means you do not negatively impact the inflexible needs of others. The detached way the adversarial legal system operates tends to illegitimately negate many of our inflexible needs.
Law-fit starts with the gacious assumption that such authorities mean well. It seeks to help authorities realign its actions with its founding purpose to respect needs. Over time, many institutions drift from their founding purpose. Law-fit can help authorities recognize their mission creep that undermines their legitimacy.
We rely on authorities to create and enforce laws. But we dangerously allow ourselves to become excessively dependent on laws to compel others to respect our needs. We allow ourselves to become more alienated.
You never have to ask others what they specifically require of you when you convince yourself that following the rules should be enough. Do established rules always cover your exact needs?
Law-fit challenges our blind faith in enforcement authorities to ensure the social order. As long as you are not the one objectified as a threat to the social order, it can be easy to hold enforcement authorities at a lower standard.
Law-fit asserts the higher authority of properly resolved needs. The more we can resolve our needs, the better we can function. We can all aspire to step beyond the harm reduction standards of law to do something that actually improves each other's lives. We can love.
Law-fit challenges the passivity of mindless obedience that undercuts our human potential to be more loving to each other. It reminds us to put each other's inflexible needs over the arbitrary demands of impersonal authorities.
Your needs can never fit the demands of laws. Laws must always fit the demands of your needs, and the needs of others.
Laws can only guide our actions to address one another's needs. No human law can ever change the needs themselves.
Our actions are flexible and rightly fall under the domain of laws. However, our innate needs remain inflexible and therefore supersede all laws. Law-fit reprioritizes our inflexible needs over flexible laws.
Law-fit can get us back to honoring the needs of others as we would have them honor our own. It encourages our potential to be more loving to each other.
Toxic legalism easily separates us from the purpose of law: to faithfully address each other's needs without compromising our own needs.
We must resolve our own needs to function well enough to sufficiently respect the needs of others.
Impersonal laws can drive a wedge between us, undermining our potential to be more loving toward each other.
Law-fit can get us back to honoring the needs of others as we would have them honor our own. Law-fit melts normalized isolation to explore some key questions. Not to defy authority or law, but to get to the helpful purpose of applying some authority or law. Law-fit can help us fulfill the purpose of laws.
For the interest of wellness, need-response uses law-fit to ask these two sets of basic questions:
1. Who benefits from the cited norm? And at what cost?
2. What need does it exist to serve? And what actual needs are being served?
Who stands to gain from the establish norm, or from its current interpretation, or from its application and enforcement? How can we know when this benefit is achieved?
By extension, what cost does this norm impose? Who stands to lose from the norm’s enactment, interpretation or enforcement? To what end or to what purpose?
Is norm enforcement premature? What evidence of bad faith warrants this application of the norm?
Why resort to external pressures of norm enforcement? Have intrinsic motivations been first incentivized? Have all mutuality options first been exhausted?
Since every affected need exists as objective fact, what are the intended and actual wellness outcomes? What specific need is to be served by the cited norm?
Is it serving an inflexible need, or placating a flexible preference? How is that being empirically measured?
What are the actual needs driving the conflict? Can those impacted by the conflict become aware of these needs with a more conciliatory approach? Or is harsh enforcement the only way to compel a response to the needs the norm exists to serve?
How is each affected person and entity able to function as a result of official action? Is anyone even gaging such impacts?
How can we shift from alienating enforcement to mutually understand and address each other’s affected needs?
We communicate this good faith intent to resolve needs mutually using the effective format of the "praise sandwich".
Law-fit nurtures mutuality by utilizing the communication format popularly known as the "praise sandwich". Any bad news gets sandwiched between bookends of good news.
More specifically, law-fit lays out three communication modes in these three lawyers.
A. Acknowledge the cited norm, and affirm the needs the norm apparently addresses. Good news to them.
B. Broach your affected needs. Likely bad news to them.
C. Continue cultivating mutual rapport. More good news for them.
Law-fit applies this simple ABC format to make sure each side addresses the underlying needs in good faith.
Acknowledge any cited norm. Affirm any needs the norm ostensibly addresses.
Express your intent to identify and resolve each other's affected needs. You want to earn their trust that you will continue to seek to mutually resolve needs properly, beyond legal minimal requirements. You express your aim to improve wellness outcomes for all, and could help them improve their legitimacy by supporting their resposnives to vulnerable needs like yours. You welcome a dialogue.
Do you see how this follows the POSITIVE-NEGATIVE-POSITIVE format of the “praise sandwich”? Can you envision how this can to cultivate and sustain mutuality?
Law-fit counters the destructive norms of adversarialism by exhausting all possible mutuality avenues. Only after all mutuality options fail do you assert your held adversarial options.
Online public campaign exposing the unresponsiveness of this particular authority.
Independent media campaign of you speaking truth to power in this proactive way.
Complaining to any ethics boards to test the reliability of any resourse options.
Spotlighting the recurring failures of the adversarial process to faithfully serve needs.
Exposing any self-serving reactions that resist accountability to serve affected needs.
Challenge funding streams lacking performance measures to accountably serve needs.
Civil disobedience with attention of a wide array of supporters and the whole world.
You incentivize those in positions of power that you both are not foes to each other, unless you both completely fail to support resolving each other’s affected needs with the power of love.
I recently applied this format to resond to the State of Michigan. They sent me a letter threatending to garnish my wages for an unpaid tuition bill. But this occurred because of the unjust fallout of being wrongly convicted back in 1993. Injustice spurs more injustice.
Note how I sandwich my concerns between addressing their concerns. I nullify cause for them to get defensive. I negate adversarialism by prioritizing each other's affected needs.
Dear Collection Services Bureau:
My name is Steph Turner and I am acknowledging receipt of a State of Michigan Liability Information Statement. It indicates I owe the state $3,659.16 in overdue tuition, from attending Oakland University’s masters of counseling degree program a decade ago.
Thank you for drawing my attention to this problem of unpaid tuition. I support the State of Michigan to receive all due funding to maintain its educational system, like Oakland University.
I must contest any assertion that ascribes responsibility for this overdue tuition solely upon my actions. I assert my rights to counter this claim, to provide full context that this action ostensibly overlooks.
If I was offered an opportunity in the past to contest the claim, then I missed it. I also join the millions disappointed in the adversarial legal system to properly address such problems.
I am currently developing a viable alternative, called need-response, to counter adversarialism with a more engaging mutuality approach to such litigated problems. It can potentially lead to a better outcome than this ill-informed legal action. You are invited to take part.
I invite you to follow the upcoming podcast to help us find a meaningful solution to the limits of the adversarial legal process to solve such a problem. More information is to follow.
Thank you,
/S/
At the time of writing this, I have yet to hear back. I look forward to providing updates on the Need-Response podcast the letter mentions.
If you have been wrongly convicted and no longer incarcerated, but cannot get a good job or housing, try this law-fit message template.
After we refine this tool and gain traction with the authorities, we can branch out to apply to it the wrongly convicted innocenct who are still incarcerated. And eventually apply to others who endure the wrongs of the adversarial legal system.
To get started, you can try this Word document template. Simply edit it to fit your needs.
Let us know how it works for you. Or drop us a line if you have any questions. Help us shape this to best serve your particular situation and needs.
Help us build this service to fit your particular need.
Use this Law-Fit discussion for:
Exploring how applicable this Law-Fit template is to your particular need.
Offering suggestions for how to shape it to suit your particular situation.
Sharing how effective or not so effective this is for you.
Connecting with others trying this alternative to the adversarial legal process.
Your helpful input is already appreciated. Let us help each other overcome the problematic limits of the adversarial legal process.
I previously crafted an interactive tool for automatically calculating the viability of an innocence claim. It compares the details of the entrant's case with those cases already exonerated. Then produces a number that demonstrates the likely innocence of the claimant. You can download your own copy by clicking this button.
The resulting Estimated Innocence Report offers a boost to the legal process. But it risks falling into the same trap of adversarialism. We are unlikely to fix a broken system with the same tools that broke it.
You can supplement your law-fit message with our Responsive Innocence tool. It applies the same praise sandwich format.
GOOD NEWS: Identifying and respecting the apparent needs of the complainant.
BAD NEWS: Identifying your own affected needs.
GOOD NEWS: Inviting mutual regard for each other's affected needs.
Click this button to learn more, and to download your own copy.
Law-fit operates on a relatively basic level. We kept it simple enough for any layperson to use on their own.
If the contacted authority replies, and you're uncertain how to what to do next, we can take this to the deeper analytical level of citationization. You can receive personalized support by the law-fit creator with one-on-one online sessions.
When you are ready, click the 'Book Now' button and find an available time slot that fits your schedule.
We offer the first session free with the understanding you will show your appreciation with what you can afford. We will continue offering this support for free for a limited time. Once we gain traction with a viable service, we will likely start charging for this service up front.
Keep in mind this is all brand new. We cannot promise anything but a fresh alternative to the disappointing adversarial legal process. If you are innocent and repeatedly ignored by the adversarial judical system, what do you have to lose? Let's create this alternatie to improve your life in ways the law can never do. Let's get back to the power of love.
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