Why Anglo-American Law Worships Procedure

By John-Michael Kuczynski

Justice Antonin Scalia once said that it doesn’t matter if an innocent man is found guilty, so long as he was “well tried.” That wasn’t just an isolated remark. It reflected an entire legal worldview—one deeply entrenched in Anglo-American systems of law.

But here’s the question: is this kind of procedural fetishism—this prioritization of form over substance, process over truth—inherent in the nature of law itself? Or is it a historical artifact of a particular legal and economic tradition?

Short answer: it’s not inherent. It’s cultural. And it’s linked to the commercial, bureaucratic, and ideological structures of Anglo-American civilization.

Is Proceduralism Inherent to Law Itself?

No. Law always requires some procedural structure. Without it, you have chaos or raw power. But the idea that procedural correctness is a substitute for justice? That’s not an inevitability. That’s an ideology.

Law does not need to ignore truth in order to function. It does not need to exclude known facts because they were introduced via the wrong procedural channel. Those are choices—choices that prioritize form over substance, and that reflect a certain conception of what law is for.

Anglo-American Law: The Proceduralist Paradise

The Anglo-American system is particularly obsessed with procedure. Why?

1. Adversarial Trials

Courts act as referees, not investigators. The judge is neutral. The search for truth is outsourced to the opposing sides.

2. Strict Rules of Evidence

Even if evidence is clearly exonerating, it can be excluded if it violates evidentiary rules. The trial is less about reality than about formal admissibility.

3. Precedent and Stare Decisis

Courts are bound by past decisions, not by evolving understandings of justice. This builds internal consistency, not necessarily moral accuracy.

Compare this to civil law systems (France, Germany, etc.):

• Judges investigate actively.

• Trials are less adversarial.

• There is more room to prioritize substantive fairness over procedural elegance.

So yes—this kind of Scalia-style proceduralism is a peculiarity of Anglo-American law, not a universal of legal reasoning.

The Deeper Root: Commerce

Why did this proceduralist ideology take hold in England and America?

Because those societies built their legal systems to serve commerce:

• Enforce contracts.

• Protect property.

• Create scalable, impersonal systems of regulation.

That requires a kind of legal predictability that only procedure can deliver.

If enforcement depends on a judge’s sense of what’s “fair,” investors and merchants can’t plan. But if enforcement depends on whether the paperwork was filed on time, the law becomes neutral, scalable, and reliable. It becomes a tool of market society.

And when that economic model becomes dominant, procedure becomes sacred.

Other societies built law around honor, virtue, or wisdom. Anglo-America built it around neutrality and efficiency. It was optimized for contracts, not cosmologies.

Truth Doesn’t Scale

That’s the core issue.

• Substantive justice is messy. It requires judgment.

• Procedural justice is scalable. It requires boxes to check.

So the system was built to reward the latter. And over time, it forgot the former.

Final Thought

The Scalia-Rawls fixation on procedure isn’t the essence of law. It’s a choice—a cultural, economic, and ideological choice.

And like any choice, it can be questioned. And, if necessary, rejected.