J-Law 5 — Time Is Property

Time, like money and property, is a valuable asset. Any judicial action that unjustly delays a matter or consumes an individual's time must be compensated.

Walk into any courtroom and observe the pricing of human hours. The attorney's time bills at hundreds of dollars per hour and is guarded jealously — hearings are scheduled around counsel's calendar, continuances granted for counsel's convenience, and every minute of counsel's labor ultimately paid by someone. The litigant's time is priced at zero. A person can lose a decade to a case that should have taken a year, surrendering career, health, savings, and irreplaceable years of life, and the system records no loss at all.

That accounting is a lie, and it is the engine that powers litigation abuse. Delay costs the powerful nothing and costs the ordinary person everything, which is exactly why delay is deployed as a weapon. An asset the system refuses to value is an asset the system will freely consume. Recognizing time as property — compensable when wrongly taken — forces courts and opposing parties to internalize the true cost of what they take from people, and gives every participant a reason to stop taking it.

The expected counterargument: time is too speculative to value, and compensating it would open the floodgates. Both halves fail. Courts and juries value time constantly — every wage claim, every wrongful-death award computing lost earning years, every attorney fee petition is a valuation of human hours, and the market publishes rates for nearly every occupation in the country. The floodgates concern inverts the problem: an enormous volume of claims would simply reveal an enormous volume of harm the system currently inflicts for free. Institutions never describe compensation as a floodgate when the money flows toward them. The objection reduces to a preference for continuing to take something valuable without paying for it, and no principle of law or morality supports that preference.