The Typewriters

I once asked my parents for a typewriter for Christmas. I wanted to write stories, and they figured writing was a nice hobby for a twelve year old boy with a big imagination. I have since written and published papers, newspaper and magazine articles and even a piece for a book on international arbitration, but it has taken me more than forty years to come back to my childhood passion of telling stories, this time with actual experience and a more grounded intent.

Learning how to type would become useful years later, as I was finishing law school. One of the requirements for graduation was to do a semester-long practice in the school's legal clinic. It mostly involves very simple things though, like getting somebody's name on a birth certificate corrected or other administrative procedural things, which amounted to very little actual learning. I learned that one could bypass it by working in the courts, where you'd learn actual procedure, so I asked my parents if they knew anyone that could help me get an internship. It turned out that they were friends with the son of one of the Supreme Court Justices (less of a big deal in Honduras than it sounds in a lot of countries), so I got an interview and was sent to the country's busiest civil courtroom for a yearlong internship.

The head judge was an honest man, soft spoken and occasionally strict but his personnel, which he didn't get to select, were not always so. Civil procedure was completely written at the time in Honduras, so there was no courtroom like you see on TV dramas. Only lines and lines of old dilapidated cheap metal desks, rickety old chairs, all equipped with what even then looked like vintage mechanical typewriters, and piles and piles of yellow folders that contained thousands of cases, most of which were everyday collections. Somebody that hadn't been able to pay the credit on their new TV which needed to be repossessed, or small loan guaranteed by a letter of exchange with no underlying assets to back it up. Only occasionally a serious commercial or land dispute that required more serious studying would come through, but it was always handled by an actually paid, more experienced clerk.

My first lesson on the ineptitude of the system came one day about a week after I began. An hour before closing time, I was handed over a pile of the yellow folders that needed to be admitted. I shrugged in frustration and sat down to start typing. Despite my best effort, about fifteen minutes before the working day came to a close, I was still trying to reduce the undiminished pile and figured I would probably have to stay late to finish it. It was then that one of the older clerks came by.

"What are you doing?", he asked. I told him I had been handed that work that urgently needed to be admitted and was planning to stay late. He then told me loudly — "What are you? An idiot? You'll be left locked inside. Leave that for tomorrow." Embarrassed that my work ethic had made me look bad, I picked up my stuff and hurried to the door along with everybody else, justice and speedy trials be damned!

Over the next year I would learn civil procedure just fine, but I would also learn about inefficiency and corruption — most of it petty, but which accumulated ended up clogging and deeply undermining the system. Years later I would remember the honest judge as a respectable man with very little control over his courtroom mechanics, overwhelmed with thousands of files that didn't belong in that courtroom but that ended up there because somebody had forgotten to amend the law and update the amount that determined when a small claim stopped and became a major one. This inefficiency transformed into petty bribes to put the yellow folder at the top of the pile or misfile a case to favour somebody who wanted to delay the process or just make it go away. Rarely, if ever, did somebody actually miss it, since the docket consisted only of handwritten notes in a simple school notebook.

Once that year passed, the judge — who I guess had seen something in me — offered me a position as a paid employee. I graciously refused. I had learned a lot during that time, but I knew I did not want to be a part of that sclerotic bureaucracy. Instead I would go on to make a career out of trying to figure out ways to dismantle it and hopefully build a better one someday.

About a year ago a scandal made the front page news. The judge that headed what was supposed to be the country's top anticorruption court was caught receiving a simulated bribe in a police sting. For the next few weeks this was all everybody talked about, rumours spreading the way they do in a small society like Honduras. I could not help but remember my days as a law clerk and ponder on how, in my view, it is not large corruption that is the main problem in Honduras but the petty, invisible, everyday kind. Most big corruption scandals are tried, though convictions aren't always secured. But the small kind — the bribes that get paid to place one file at the top of the pile at the expense of another, perhaps more urgent or serious one; a missing file that delays justice without consequence; the phone call to warn a lawyer in advance that an order is on its way to be executed, and to tell his client not to be there but to leave an envelope with cash instead — this type of corruption compounds until it ends up rotting the entire system and becomes the norm that emboldens those who are supposed to fight against it to turn into just another sprocket in the machine.

What happened next made the story worse, not better. The judge was arrested, detained for a few months, and then — in the way these things go in Honduras — released. Not exonerated, not cleared, simply returned to circulation while the case worked its way through whatever remained of the process he had once been paid to safeguard. A few weeks ago, he asked for his old job back. Something that the authorities seem to be considering, as to this day there has been no outright refusal.

The request itself told me something the original scandal hadn't: that the system does not actually expect to punish itself. An arrest is theatre. A sting is a headline. The quiet, unremarkable request to resume as though nothing occurred that comes after is the real disclosure. It says, more plainly than any indictment could, that consequence is optional, and that everyone already knows it. A society built on this ends up with a perception that everything is corrupt and that nothing can be done to correct course.

This is not merely cynicism on my part. There is research on this, and it is more precise than my own memory of yellowed folders and misfiled cases. But there is a further, uglier twist to it. Officials themselves, when they come to believe that corruption around them is widespread, become measurably more willing to be corrupted — because the fear of standing out as the one who got caught evaporates once getting caught starts to look like bad luck rather than a real risk.

This, I think, is the actual damage of a system like the one I clerked in. The damage isn't the scale of any single bribe, but the perception that this kind of pettiness creates in everyone who passes through it: the belief that the government's every action is presumptively corrupt, followed by the conclusion that honesty is a kind of naivety, and that if everyone else is quietly taking their cut, you would be a fool not to take yours.

Plenty of work has been done to strengthen the Honduran judiciary since I clerked there. The old typewriters have since been replaced by modern computers. The desks now look nice, clean and modern. The hardware has been upgraded, but the underlying software remains the same. Large institutions like banks, multinational corporations and other big companies have found a workaround in arbitration, which is more efficient and transparent in general. That is, however, a solution that is only available to a few who can afford it.

In my work I have discovered that courts and dispute resolution systems are almost always treated as a kind of afterthought when trying to build a system, yet they provide the underlying software that allows everything else to function properly. Public works tenders work well and transparently when the rules of the game are predictable and punishment for misbehaviour expected. Investment flows where it knows the rules and consequences in advance, and public services are delivered when providers end up paying for the consequences of their failure. But a functioning court doesn't get a parade. A good and honest judge doesn't get celebrated. Most people don't notice the peace that comes with a transparent and predictable judiciary — because when it exists, stability becomes the norm, and none of us ever celebrates normal.

I believe that in the near future Special Economic Zones will become the heart and soul of the new global trade system. Any future developer of one would do well to consider this a big part of its institutional design. Places like Dubai's DIFC or Singapore have proven it can be done, and shown how getting it right compounds over time for the benefit of all of society. Technology can be a great enabler to do this, perhaps even a leapfrogging tool for this purpose, but it cannot fix the problem alone. Assuming that it can is making the same mistake all over again, just with better hardware, like trading the typewriters for computers while keeping the same rotten and outdated software underneath.

Plenty has been said about the threat that artificial intelligence poses to developing nations. I am not so sure about that, but that is a question worth its own essay. For now, though, I'll settle for a smaller, stranger hope: that whatever notices a missing folder next doesn't need to be human, only reliable.