Resolved: That justified acts of vengeance ought to sanctioned by the government.

The need for establishing the historic precedence for the system of justice which we follow was required by the attempt to some how show that Socrates would be an endorser of your view point. A measure which I found to be quite ironic because when Socrates himself was up for trial for corrupting the youth and impiety, after he found guilty the jury was asked to consider punishments. The prosecutor argued for the death penalty, and Socrates initially offered the sum of 100 drachmas to make amends for his crime, which was about 1/5th of his net worth. Later in the hearing, after his friends and students came to his aid, it was argued that his crimes could be made amends by the sum of 3,000 drachma. So - Socrates himself, who argued that "giving to each man the exact measure of his due" could achieve justice through his direct action showed that he supported that the exact measure of one's due could be achieved with a financial sum. My concise history of the civil and criminal trial's beginning in western civilization was simply done in order to reestablish the context of the teachings of Socrates. Many study his teachings through the works of Plato without the appropriate background in Ancient Greek history and culture. You claim that the present system of justice creates a notion of a "holier than thou" approach to the law. While any practitioner of the law could probably admit a time in their life when they broke the law, no individual is perfect and our justice system does not have perfect enforcement. Hence why for some crimes, such as speeding, the fine is relatively low and insufferable as speeding is not considered to be a blatant moral infringement. With the structure of fines and penalties, the court system acknowledges that some crimes are more easily and frequently committed than others, and do not harm the society as much. What you advocate for is direct retribution performed by the plaintiff against the defendant. In a civil case, we represent this retribution with the form of dollars. This monetary sum, this pecuniary penalty is not sufficient for you and so you wish to create a system in which we issue permits to exact retribution. You will assign a value of the crime to the number of times the plaintiff is allowed to hit the guilty defendant with a baseball bat, or some other physical extraction. Yet, the legal argument against such punishments is so old that Shakespeare featured it in the Merchant of Venice where Shylock found himself unable to execute a contract calling for a pound of paltry flesh due to issues regarding not one gram less, or one gram more, and not spilling a single drop of blood, and so forth. You seek to create a third party agency, effectively another branch of our justice system where by the exact same process you complained about - a hearing with either judges or jurors present to make a judgment, would issue a permit for revenge. In the case of carrying out this permit, there is only one punishment which can be accurately carried out - death. Corporal punishments, even if same in number, create an inequality in punishment as each strike cannot be the same. And if one seeks to destroy the property of another, in affect all they are doing is issuing a pecuniary punishment indirectly. What you ask is that we create a system that simply creates more victims, and you call this justice. Your complaints about the pomp and circumstance of our court system would be still present, the only difference is that the action against the guilty would be carried out by the individual instead of the state and punishments would not involve monetary exchanges or prison sentencing. Yet another false perception is that justice is a form of instinct. It is clearly not. Any observation of a group of children playing a game together is proof of that. Rules are often made, and changed as suited. The 'leader' of the group will shape rules so that they're allowed to do things, when they other players aren't. This edict is accepted as being fair, although it is far from being truly fair or truly just. We must teach children of the rights of others, and how to respect others. If justice were truly a form of instinct, this stage would be unnecessary. Children are typically regarded as being instinctive creatures and full of Id. As a result, our justice system treats them differently than adult offenders. We even allow an individual to claim temporary insanity on account of their instinctive reaction to something. This argument often results in mercy before the court. Our society recognizes that a persons instinct might interfere with their rational thinking and cause them to do something they otherwise might not. If justice were truly instinctive, society would never have developed laws in the first place. There would be no impressive buildings, and no legends linking Justice to divine origins. Why you ask for is not a system of justice, but a license to commit tyranny against an individual. Revenge should not be mistaken as justice and nor should it be licensed by the governoment.