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Justice Delayed is Justice Denied | Essay | Expansion & Meaning

March 10, 2020 by Study Mentor 5 Comments

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Meaning of “Justice Delayed is Justice Denied”

The saying ‘justice delayed is justice denied’ is quite famous and used often. It has a deep and significant meaning which reflects true situations. It is a legal maxim which has historic origins.

Justice delayed is justice denied is a maxim which means that even if remedy against an illegal injury caused is available but not executed in due time, such a situation is comparable to having no remedy at all.

When justice is not provided to the injured party in timely manner, and is prolonged to an insufferable amount of time, it is a form of injustice to the injured party. Apart from the opportunity to get justice, it is also necessary for justice and remedy to be provided in a speedy manner.

There are many theories as to the origin of the phrase. One account suggests that the phrase ‘justice delayed is justice denied finds its roots in the Pirkei Avot, which is the teachings passed down by the Rabbis.

The phrase was also used in the famous charter Magna Carta. As long ago as 1215 CE, the phrase was reflected in clause 40 of the Magna Carta which reads as “To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay, right or justice.” Therefore, the meaningful idea of the phrase is centuries old.

This popular and relevant saying has been used by various famous personalities to highlight various situations. It was first used by William E. Gladstone. William E. Gladstone was one of the most prominent politicians of Britain. Later, he became the Prime Minister of the country.

He said this quote to highlight the problem of delay in justice. Later, the phrase was also used by Martin Luther King Jr . , the pioneer of black rights and equality in America. In his famous ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that “justice too long delayed is justice denied”.

He used this phrase to highlight the injustice and racism faced by the black community in America by the government and the ruling white community. Such a situation of injustice had been going on for far too long, leading to denial of justice to the one who had suffered.

Thus, he wrote this to highlight the bleak situation if gross violation of human rights of the black people which had been going on for a long time, which in a way, also amounted to denial of justice.

Indian Context

On the 15th of August, 1947 , India finally got its freedom. It had been denied justice for far too long. India fought back, peacefully, and gained independence from the British colonialists who had no choice but to give in to the will of millions of Indians who provided a united front. But, the British had left India poor and struggling.

The justice system that India has today is a product of the British rule in India. The judiciary system of India is based on the British model. But the important fact is, this model is quite old and outdated. It is because of this outdated system of courts organisation in India, that there is a delay in providing of justice.

And when that delay is prolonged for far too long, it amounts to the denial of justice itself. Is such a system healthy for the largest and perhaps the most vibrant democracy in the world?

Let’s take the example of case of a motor car accident. In this accident, the victim has suffered huge loss because of the negligence of the defendant. Due to the accident, the victim is no longer able to provide to her family. As she was the sole bread earner of the family, the family is left destitute and devastated.

The case is pending before the court. Due to delays, backlogs, fees, etc., the case is tried for 10 years. Only after period of ten years is compensation provided to the victim. Is the compensation of any use now? The victim and his family suffered for 10 years.

The children could not get proper education and the family became destitute. Such a situation is not reversible. Justice, in this case, is denied due to the delay in providing it.

In fact, the Indian Judiciary is so infamous for delays that people prefer not to seek court remedy if they can avoid it. Is such a mindset good? This would ultimately result in people having no faith in their own Judiciary. Such a situation would be quite dangerous.

Then, why are there so many delays in the delivery of judgments? In India, there are about 10,000 courts. We have one Supreme Court which is the highest branch of Judiciary in India, twenty- one High Courts in various states, 3150 District Courts, one in each District of India and about 3825 Magisterial courts divided into First class and Second Class.

Apart from this, we also have various tribunals, Lok Adalat’s, etc. According to a recent survey, there are more than 34 Lakh cases which are pending in High Courts and more than 4 crore cases that are pending in District Courts. This is the situation of the Indian Judiciary. Many of these cases will take years to finally resolve.

Apart from the number of courts, the number of judges is also inadequate. With a population of over a billion, India needs a lot of judges for speedy disposal of cases.

But, this has not been done in India. For example, in Mumbai which is the economic capital of India, there are 50 magisterial courts, serving more than 12 million people. Therefore, a court serves a population of over 2 lakhs! Such is the situation in just one city.

The scenario in all of India is just as bleak. According to a survey, a population of about 10 lakh is server by a mere number of 12 judges in India.

Not only this, many judges that are appointed are incompetent and ineffective. If lawyers give proper advice and judges give proper judgement, the problem of delay will be solved.

Lawyers are also a cause of delay in providing justice. Some keep on extending the case to extort money from their client while others keep delaying the dates of hearing to harass the other party of the case.

In some cases, the accused is kept in prison till her trial is on- going. If after a lot of delay, it is finally proved that the accused is in fact not guilty, will it not be injustice? She spent years rotting away in prison when she was not even guilty.

Because of delay in providing justice, her life is over. Other delays are also caused by corrupt officials and judges. Judges are appointed not by the Judiciary but by the Executive. The party in power appoints judges who favour them, which leads to corruption and mal- practices.

Then, what can be done? To make sure there is no delay, the number of courts and judges should be increased. The mechanism to file a case should be simplified and made less costly. The judges should be appointed according to stringent requirements and guidelines. This would only be a starting step. There are many other measures that need to be taken.

Dr. Cyrus Das rightly said that, “Justice is a consumer product and must therefore meet the test of confidence, reliability and dependability like any other product if it is to survive market scrutiny. It exists for the citizenry, at whose service only the system of justice must work” Thus, delay in justice cannot be tolerated.

Reader Interactions

March 8, 2020 at 9:27 pm

Thanks for this!! You helped me a lot for my assignment

March 8, 2020 at 9:32 pm

Thanks for this!! You helped me a lot for my assignment. Thank you very much

March 10, 2020 at 9:45 pm

Happy to hear

March 28, 2020 at 7:19 am

Justice delayed is justice denied means far more than the sentence written and the objective act of getting justice through accountability and consequence. Justice is more importantly a measurement of the value among any human being which is inter-dependent of she/he deserving to have justice. Justice is also the fundamental right to safety, which branches into a human rights issue which can implicate the outcome from associated new interpretations, responses, and outlooks integrated into one’s actions/experiences. The core principles of self dignity, equality, and safety is evolved and intertwined into the meaning of justice. Justice denied is similar and correlated with justice delayed because a delay in time strengthens such development of the devaluation and the insecurity in a person’s, population, or aggregate’s experience in life. Prompt justice is imperative which resembles our social justice principles that we are expected to adhere to in principles and society.

February 10, 2021 at 8:53 pm

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Justice Delayed is Justice Denied Essay for Students and Children in 1000+ Words

Here you will read Essay on Justice Delayed is Justice Denied Essay for Students and Children in 1000+ Words. This includes meany of this phrase and demerits of delayed justice.

Table of Contents

Justice Delayed is Justice Denied Essay (1000+ words)

For modern civilization, justice is one of the functional parts. According to the state of affairs in the Indian judiciary and alarming, there are more than 3 crores cases pending in our country. The necessary step should be taken to maintain justice unless people lose faith in the justice delivery system.

To solve all those cases, it will take around 300 years. There are multiple backlogs of cases in many states of India . From a report in January 2015, the Supreme Court has a total of 62,794 pending cases.

At the end of 2013 A.D, about 44.5 lakhs cases are pending in 24 high courts and 2.6 crores cases in other lower courts. All these cases include civil and criminal cases.

People are relying on the courts to get justice. But at this rate, it is very hard to achieve. As per the survey, Allahabad (Prayagraj) has the highest pendency of cases with 10, 43,395. Out of this case, criminal cases are 3, 81,615.

The Meaning of This Phrase

This idiom is put forward by William E Gladstone, in the late 1800s. He was a former British Statesman and Prime Minister. At the passage of time, the meaning of this phrase has been spoken in many different ways.

The phrase ‘Justice delayed is Justice Denied’ means within a certain time the justice is not carried out, then after some time even if the justice is served but it is not justice as in the exact period of time justice was not served.

This phrase is actually a very charming saying. Sometimes it is difficult to understand its meaning. Justice is everyone’s right. Justice should be served within a specific time. The system of justice has the genuine worth of the judicial rights of these civilians. We can name justice as the guardian of civil rights and the shield of innocence.

Martin Luther King had quoted a statement that ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ Justice should be impartial, cheap, and speedy when it serves a genuine judiciary system. 

The idiom ‘Justice delayed is Justice Denied’ has huge importance. If someone is intentionally delaying something as important as justice, then justice is denied, and due to such ignorance, the culprit can escape easily.

The True Judgment 

Knowing the truth and not doing anything is the biggest crime. In India, there are many cases hanging in the courts, and the law is not strong enough to solve them all within the limited time.

People, who are seeking for justice, have to face lots of ups and downs in this path. The case may be a civil one or a criminal one, it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is justice. Without justice, it is impossible to gain the trust of people on the jurisdiction system.

Those who have filed their cases and are waiting eagerly for the outcome but can’t receive in time, is not justice. In history, we all know about the method of the judgment of kings. There were no delays in their judgments. 

The kings had enough power to punish the culprits and give justice to the people. We must have noticed in our society about these unpleasant situations. The people of society always find them guilty and punish them at once. 

When justice gets delayed, the criminal can escape. He/she can prove in the court that he or she is innocent by removing all the pieces of evidence or anything that can happen.

The lawyer that the criminal has hired can prove that his or her client is not guilty. This will be the worst scenario that a criminal can escape easily due to the weak and delayed judgment. 

In this democratic country, people are looking for clean and genuine justice. It can help people keep their faith in the jurisdiction system. 

Demerits of Delayed Justice

Do you ever know why justice is deferred? The investigation which is running by the police to put the criminal behind bars delays the process of justice. As the investigation is going on, it is impossible to keep them as a criminal.

When the whole procedure of investigation is accomplished with proofs, the police will drag the criminal to the court. After that, many law-and-order duties are there to maintain the formalities. 

Negligence of investigation from the police also causes a delay in justice. The phrase ‘Justice delayed is Justice Denied’ is completely applicable here. Sometimes, the police are making the delay in filling the charge sheets. 

Even if the charge sheet is deposited at the court after some time, it is still a long process to take the case on the file. After that, the court will communicate with the clients and culprits with lawyers from both sides on a sanctioned date.

There are no special courts to take immediate action against the most insane crimes such as murder, rape, burglary. These courts are exclusively for such kinds of crimes. They must be set up with the supremacies to take cognizance of felonies directly. After finding the culprit, they must conduct a trial on a day-to-day basis.

But sadly, our jurisdiction does not have this kind of facility to punish the culprit. The time is short for the victim’s family to get justice in such kind of slowest jurisdiction procedure. Also, in our country, the courts have to face too much litigation from the Government side as many of the cases are against the department of the government.

10 Lines about Justice delayed is Justice Denied

• The time taken by the jurisdiction to give justice is completely dissatisfactory.
• Sometimes, the delayed decision from the courts helps the culprit to escape from justice.
• The family of the victims suffers a lot due to delayed justice. 
• The investigation procedure makes the judgment more delayed sometimes.
• In the time of the kings, there were no delays in getting justice.
• Justice has to be served to the victims so that the people can rely on the jurisdiction system.
• Police and their investigation play a huge role in the time of justice.
• The laws and orders should be stricter to get justice in time.
• Special courts should be set up for immediate action against serious crimes.
• The procedure to put the culprits behind bars should be conducted in an enhanced way.

The idiom ’Justice Delayed is Justice Denied’ states that an irrational adjournment in justice management. The statement explains the unacceptable denial of justice. The main reason for delayed justice in our country is the lack of a satisfactory number of judges.

This has a huge impact on the delay of justice and the jurisdiction of India. We hope that the system may change to something different on a day that can bring peace and justice to everyone.

1 thought on “Justice Delayed is Justice Denied Essay for Students and Children in 1000+ Words”

This essay is good. In the essey some places the word jurisdiction is used. But in those places the word judicial system should be replaced.

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William E. Gladstone: 'Justice delayed is justice denied.'

Justice delayed is justice denied.

"Justice delayed is justice denied," a powerful quote by William E. Gladstone, succinctly captures the essence of how delays in the legal system can lead to a denial of justice for individuals seeking redress. The quote emphasizes the critical importance of timely resolutions in legal matters, highlighting how the passage of time can erode the efficacy of justice and undermine its very purpose. When individuals are forced to wait endlessly for a resolution to their legal issues, the prolonged delay can exacerbate their suffering, prolong their sense of injustice, and diminish their faith in the legal system's ability to provide fair outcomes.However, when we dive deeper into the philosophical realm, an intriguing concept emerges that challenges our conventional understanding of time, justice, and the human experience. This concept revolves around the idea of temporal perception and the subjective nature of time. In philosophy, time is often viewed as a fluid and malleable construct, shaped not only by external factors such as clocks and calendars but also by internal experiences and perceptions. When we consider the saying "time is a social construct," we are compelled to question whether our fixation on timeliness and immediacy in the pursuit of justice is rooted in a rigid societal framework or if there is a more profound temporal dimension at play.By juxtaposing the stark reality of delayed justice with the philosophical notion of the fluidity of time, we are prompted to reconsider our preconceived notions of justice and explore the intricate interplay between time, perception, and the pursuit of fairness. While the quote by Gladstone underscores the urgency of timely justice delivery and the detrimental effects of delays on individuals, the philosophical concept challenges us to contemplate the deeper layers of temporality and how our perception of time influences our understanding of justice.In this dual exploration of the quote and the philosophical concept, we are reminded of the intricate web of factors that shape our experience of justice and the complex interplay between external realities and internal perceptions. As we navigate the complexities of the legal system and confront the challenges of ensuring timely resolutions for all, we are encouraged to reflect on the multifaceted nature of justice and the dynamic relationship between time and fairness. Ultimately, by embracing a more nuanced understanding of time and justice, we can strive to cultivate a legal system that is not only efficient and effective but also attuned to the deeper rhythms of human experience and the ever-evolving nature of time itself.

Albert Einstein: 'You can't blame gravity for falling in love.'

David ogilvy: 'leaders grasp nettles.'.

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Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied: Judges Fail To Rule in a Timely Manner on FOIA Cases

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was passed to ensure the public’s right to know what their government was doing. Recognizing that the legal maxim that “justice delayed is justice denied,” provisions were included in the original bill to help ensure that the records requested were promptly released. Response delays still became a perennial problem, so additional provisions were added by Congress to further ensure these timeliness requirements were in fact met.

Unfortunately, to date these statutory mandates appear to have had little effect. Indeed, FOIA is becoming undermined by endless delays. Federal officials increasingly ignore these deadlines, forcing FOIA requesters to take them to court. As a result, the number of FOIA lawsuits have been rising because federal agencies were often not responding at all . Now the FOIA Project has documented that federal judges are increasingly failing to rule in a timely manner when requesters are forced to file suit to enforce FOIA requirements.

All these delays have practical consequences. Sometimes individuals require records to deal with pressing personal matters. Others seek information on immediate public policy issues. Because of these delays, for example, FOIA requesters seeking records about Trump administration policies often will not obtain them until long after President Trump has left office. And unless matters change, the same will be true for FOIA requesters seeking records about the new Biden administration’s policies.

Many of the requests that require filing lawsuits to compel disclosure involve requests by reporters and media organizations , as well as by nonprofit and advocacy organizations . These requesters are seeking access to information needed to ensure transparency and to provide the public with the information required to hold government officials accountable. Here failure to obtain timely access undermines our democratic foundations.

Failure of District Court Judges To Rule in a Timely Manner

The latest case-by-case court records show that even after filing suits, FOIA requesters are facing longer and longer delays before their cases are decided. Indeed, the backlog of pending FOIA court cases is growing much faster than the increase in litigation because judges are failing to rule in a timely manner and allowing cases to drag on for years.

As of the end of FY 2020, the number of FOIA cases pending in the federal courts climbed to 1,683. This is more than three and a half times the number of pending cases ten years ago in FY 2010 when the pending court caseload was just 467. As shown in Figure 1, the sharpest climb began during FY 2017 and has continued.

The backlog does not seem driven merely by case filings. During the last two years, FOIA filings have not increased while the FOIA lawsuit backlog continued to balloon. The number of new lawsuits peaked in FY 2018 when a total of 871 new FOIA suits were filed. In FY 2019 suits were slightly lower with 854 new filings, and this fell to 808 during FY 2020. However, the backlog of undecided court cases continued to grow.

For many years the relationship between the number of new filings each year compared to the number of closed cases had roughly tracked one another. In some years, the number of new filings exceeded closed cases; in other years, the number of new filings was less than the number of closed cases. This year-to-year variation balanced out over time, keeping the total pending FOIA caseload in the courts fairly steady for over a decade starting in FY 2001 when this study’s analysis begins. However, as shown in Figure 2 and detailed in Table 1, cases began to outpace closures starting in FY 2014. This imbalance accelerated starting in FY 2017 after former President Trump assumed office.

What Is the Source of These Court Delays?

FOIA lawsuits make up a very small proportion of the federal court caseload. FOIA cases made up less than 14 out of every 10,000 cases filed in FY 2020, and an average of 17 of every 10,000 cases filed since FY 2015. Thus, it seems unlikely that the increasing number of these lawsuits had a material impact on the court’s overall workload or were the source of the delay.

Indeed, since FY 2015, pending caseloads have not shown the explosion we have seen for FOIA litigation. Until FY 2020, the number of new criminal and civil cases filed have sometimes been higher, and sometimes a bit lower than cases which were closed . Last year, however, was not necessarily indicative of any long term trend. The pandemic disrupted many areas of society and government in ways that made it unique [1 ] . However, the trends seen for FOIA litigation have been building for years.

It is also true that a majority of FOIA suits are filed in the District of Columbia where they make up a larger share of the court’s workload. However, even in D.C., FOIA filings last year were only around 11.8 percent of the D.C.’s criminal and civil filings. But the delays being seen for FOIA litigation appear to be occurring nationwide and include districts outside D.C.

How Much Longer Are Cases in the FOIA Backlog Waiting?

While the FOIA court backlog grew by 12 percent between FY 2019 and FY 2020, the growth in cases that had been already waiting for lengthy periods of time grew even faster. For example, as shown in Table 2, FOIA cases that had been pending for forty-eight months or more grew by nearly fifty percent (46%).

In general, growth rates were higher for cases that had already been waiting for some time. For cases that had been waiting 12 months or more, the number of pending FOIA lawsuits grew by 29 percent. For those waiting 24 months or more, the number of pending FOIA cases increased to 49 percent. For those waiting even longer, up to 51 months or longer, the number of cases grew at similar rates hovering around 50 percent. Longer waits showed sizable, but still lower, increases.

A total of 83 FOIA cases had been waiting for five or more years and the court had still not decided the case. A dozen FOIA cases had been pending for ten years or more and were still awaiting resolution at the district court level.

FY 2020 FOIA Project’s Lawsuit App

Accompanying this report, FOIAproject.org has just updated the period covered by the project’s FOIA Lawsuits App . This free user tool allows the public to drill into these numbers. Users can examine overall figures, or drill in by government department, by agencies within departments, and by independent agencies.

Available are trends on new suits filed, cases closed, and the backlog of FOIA cases currently pending before federal district courts and how long suits have been waiting for resolution.

[1] The Northern District of Florida did experience an enormous spike in case in FY 2020. There a consolidated case involving veterans claiming injury from alleged defective 3M earplugs was being heard.

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Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied

August 28, 2020  • Aspen Global Leadership Network

“Justice delayed is justice denied” is an ancient legal concept, but it’s been cast in stark relief in the last few months. The new pressures of the current pandemic have heightened the reality of inequality and injustice. Systems that most of the world contently ignored have reached a breaking point—or, perhaps, a boiling point. Now is the time that leaders must act to rectify generations of discriminatory systems.

This year, the 2020 Resnick Aspen Action Forum took Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to action: “the fierce urgency of now,” as its theme. Four Aspen Global Leadership Network Fellows from across different Fellowships joined in conversation for its third plenary session . In this series of Spark Talk influenced conversations, Tina Fernandez , a Pahara-Aspen Education Fellow and the founding CEO of Achieve Atlanta , and James Abraham , a Kamalnayan Bajaj Fellow and the founder and director of Solar Arise , moderated the Fellows as they discussed their experiences confronting injustice in the world and their perspectives on what we owe to each other through four lenses: income inequality, gender parity, action against climate change, and racial equity.

Income Inequality

Many people are familiar with the reality of income inequality, but they may not understand how it operates on a global scale. Henry Crown Fellow Kenneth Ofori-Atta , Ghana’s Minister for Finance and Economic Planning, tells the story from an African point of view, where richer nations are “sucking money out of the continent.”

There is, he said, an unofficial “Africa premium,” in which lenders impose a higher cost of capital on African ventures—a surcharge that is completely out of line with historic repayment rates. This has led to undercapitalization and underinvestment, and COVID-19 has only made things worse. While the aggregate economy has been moving briskly for the previous two decades, the costs of the pandemic have erased those gains; GDPs are estimated to be down by 15 percent. The world’s largest economies, putting their reserve currencies to use, have “broken all the rules of classical economics” to save themselves, but this is a luxury that African countries do not have.

The inequalities run deeper than fiat and finance, however. Ofori-Atta argues that there is a troubling devaluing of tangible goods and resources in global trade.

“The fundamental equity is the raw material, but somehow we have upended this to make intellectual capital to be more profitable than that,” he said. He cites the example of cocoa farmers in Ghana; they feed the world’s craving for chocolate and “get snake bites and cutlass wounds” in the process, but reap only a small percentage from the $100 billion international chocolate industry. All that value-add doesn’t leave much for the actual producers. To rebuild Africa’s economy, we need to center and value the producers first.

Gender Parity

“We have enough data and compelling business cases and human rights cases that show gender parity has a fundamental bearing on whether or not economies and societies thrive,” said Alexandra Kissling , a Fellow from the Central America Leadership Initiative and the president of the Vital Network in Costa Rica. “Women have a huge impact on growth and competitiveness and readiness.” Unfortunately, she said, “we live in a world in which people have unconscious biases based on male and female stereotypes.”

Societies have harnessed the differences between men and women to build systems of injustice, rather than using those differences to transform society. The math is simple: “When we invest in women, we improve the world. We are half of the world’s available talent.”

Kissling’s experiences working with women who face limited access to opportunities have led her to rethink how we should approach the problem—and her answer is in proximity. “If you want to help a community to transform itself… go and be with them, understand how they live and become empathic, proximate, and then design by putting human needs at the center of the equation.”

Jianyu Zhang is a Fellow in the China Fellowship Program and the managing director of the China Program for the Environmental Defense Fund . He thinks about climate change in two dimensions. The first is spatial, in which the rich countries of the north produce the carbon that disproportionately affects the countries of the south. The second is temporal. Humanity, in aggregate, is drawing all the benefits of fossil fuels right now, “but the consequence is more to be seen for the generations to come, so we’re leaving this issue to our children, our grandchildren, and even for future generations.”

There is a metaphor in the pandemic. “Right now, every country is fighting the pandemic by themselves,” Zhang said. “I think we already seen the shortfall of having a global alliance of fighting back together, quarantine-wise and vaccine-wise. And I think that’s just really a preview of the fight that we’re having with climate change.” He believes we cannot succeed if we’re not united.

Racial Equity

“One of the things that’s so pernicious about race is that it operates sort of at an automatic level,” said Stephen DeBerry , a Henry Crown Fellow and the managing partner of Silicon Valley’s Bronze Venture Fund . “It’s something that we’ve been socialized to think or act around, and it’s not something that we’re necessarily being conscious of or intentional about all the time.” This has led to inequitable systems designed around things like the fiction of race—something DeBerry, as a scholar of anthropology, is acutely aware.

But there are other aspects of our current system that create inequity because they are also based on wrong or outdated ideas.

The systems of our everyday lives, he says, were built largely in the context of the industrial era, which had a lot of zero-sum thinking. “It also happened to be, particularly in the United States, the era of legal segregation,” he noted. “And so the fundamental logic that we use to think about systems and the way that things flow starts from a place of assuming that there will be an us-versus-them.”

DeBerry believes we will see a better future, one in which technology eases our workloads, and societal strife. “I think if we do take on this challenge of thinking more inclusively, that’s where we’re headed,” he said. “We’re not headed to a place of conflict and constraint and a lack of resources—we’re headed to a place of ease.”

View the entire discussion, recorded live but distanced, and scroll through the page for other plenaries from this year’s 2020 Resnick Aspen Action Forum .

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