Breadcrumb: Rules for judges

Deut. 16:18-20 reminds judges to be impartial in their rulings. Specifically, judges should not pay attention to the rank of the accuser or accused and they should not take bribes. In short, God is trying to establish a system of fair justice, where even the poor can get an impartial ruling. Whether this system worked in practice, we likely will never know. Most likely, it worked about as well as all other justice systems: despite the words of the text, the rich likely received some preferential treatment and some judges likely did accept bribes. But the idea is the important thing.