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An Idea for a New Law
We've all seen stuff like this before.
http://www.boingboing.net/2011/01/24/flier-beats-tsa-vide.html
Some guy goes online and researches the law. He knows he is not required to show ID at the airport and he knows that he can film in any public space. Of course, the law enforcement officers on the scene do not know the law. Even though the guy gets acquitted in court, he owes a bunch of legal fees.
Of course, we see opposite situations as well. There was the guy who researched all the laws, and then used a remote controlled plane with an attached camera to take some great shots of NYC. When the police approached him, they acted appropriately.
I was thinking today, that there is an easy solution to all of these problems. We can make one federal law that applies to law enforcement agents no matter where they are. Here is what the law should do.
Basically if there is ever a situation where a non-violent civilian is engaged with a law enforcement officer, and there is a question about what is or is not legal, the law enforcement officer MUST make a call or use the Internet to verify the law and regulation. They must then read the regulation or law aloud to the civilian. Then both parties are free to change their minds before any action is taken. If the person realizes that yes, they are breaking the law, they can begin cooperating. If the officer realizes that no, this person isn't doing anything illegal, they can let them go. And, of course, if someone makes the wrong choice, on either side, they pay the price as usual. Be it being arrested for breaking the law, or getting busted for wrongful arrest.
In the age of the Internet, you should have to spend thousands of dollars on lawyers and go to court just because people can't understand the law. Not even lawyers know all the law. Civilians and cops are definitely not going to know all of it. With the technology we have now,the least we can do is look it up before we arrest people and make trouble for no reason.
If our government had any money, I would suggest one more thing. I would establish a nationwide free "is it legal" hotline accessible by phone and internet. Obviously this hotline will hurt lawyers, as they won't be able to charge people huge fees to answer simple legal questions anymore. However, they'll still make a bunch of money doing actual legal work. Also, the hotline should not give legal advice, as in "you should do X." It will only answer questions saying what is and is not legal, and what the penalties are.
Also, like 911, they should make recordings of all the calls public, for the sake of comedy.
http://www.boingboing.net/2011/01/24/flier-beats-tsa-vide.html
Some guy goes online and researches the law. He knows he is not required to show ID at the airport and he knows that he can film in any public space. Of course, the law enforcement officers on the scene do not know the law. Even though the guy gets acquitted in court, he owes a bunch of legal fees.
Of course, we see opposite situations as well. There was the guy who researched all the laws, and then used a remote controlled plane with an attached camera to take some great shots of NYC. When the police approached him, they acted appropriately.
I was thinking today, that there is an easy solution to all of these problems. We can make one federal law that applies to law enforcement agents no matter where they are. Here is what the law should do.
Basically if there is ever a situation where a non-violent civilian is engaged with a law enforcement officer, and there is a question about what is or is not legal, the law enforcement officer MUST make a call or use the Internet to verify the law and regulation. They must then read the regulation or law aloud to the civilian. Then both parties are free to change their minds before any action is taken. If the person realizes that yes, they are breaking the law, they can begin cooperating. If the officer realizes that no, this person isn't doing anything illegal, they can let them go. And, of course, if someone makes the wrong choice, on either side, they pay the price as usual. Be it being arrested for breaking the law, or getting busted for wrongful arrest.
In the age of the Internet, you should have to spend thousands of dollars on lawyers and go to court just because people can't understand the law. Not even lawyers know all the law. Civilians and cops are definitely not going to know all of it. With the technology we have now,the least we can do is look it up before we arrest people and make trouble for no reason.
If our government had any money, I would suggest one more thing. I would establish a nationwide free "is it legal" hotline accessible by phone and internet. Obviously this hotline will hurt lawyers, as they won't be able to charge people huge fees to answer simple legal questions anymore. However, they'll still make a bunch of money doing actual legal work. Also, the hotline should not give legal advice, as in "you should do X." It will only answer questions saying what is and is not legal, and what the penalties are.
Also, like 911, they should make recordings of all the calls public, for the sake of comedy.
Comments
However, for sufficiently simple statutes, this could be a good idea.
I'll wait for a lawyerly type to weigh in and tell us why we're all stupid.
My only worry is what happens if the hotline gets it wrong? If I call the hotline and they say that model rockets in the park are AOK, but then when the cop calls they say the opposite, OH SHIT. Can I sue the hotline? This I think is the most serious problem.
EDIT: I'd also like to add: Fuck you, White Plains.
It's the sort of task that's menial enough to drive away the people smart enough to actually do the job correctly.
EDIT: What we should do is just have one dude that's really smart, and that guy knows all the laws. If there's a dispute, you go to him and he recites all the laws until you hear the one that applies. By the time you get there, you've probably stopped caring about whatever minor infraction brought you there and you go off drinking. Everybody wins!
Even for non-codified or soft changes, real change control/management systems effectively make the subjective reasonably objective for purposes of figuring out whether or not you're violating a policy.
TL;DR: This is a solved problem lacking only implementation. (Though I agree that implementation would be onerous at best).
I'm also not sure how readily we could codify case law in a way that would make it readily accessible. I defer to the legal scholars on that one.
EDIT: Yes, onerous is a good way to sum up the implementation of this sort of thing. Maybe we should just leave old laws where they are, codify every new statute going forward, and when a new statute changes or amends an old non-codified statute, you codify it then and there.
Basically, say "fuck it" to the backlog until we need to care.
Of course, I've also done that sort of thing in the lab - implementing a new records control scheme while keeping the old one intact - and brother, "onerous" doesn't begin to describe it.
Several hundred Ohio laws are enacted/modified/repealed/dead-wooded every year.
My tax accountant has a tome of several thousand pages each year for changes to the tax code.
Those don't even take into account things like circuit court rulings, supreme court rulings, and attorney general opinions that change laws without the content of the laws actually changing.
Obviously, ignorance is no excuse. Even if I am legitimately ignorant of the fact that stealing is outlawed, that does not grant me a license to steal whatever I want.
However, what happens when you have a law so complicated that an average person can not figure out what the law says?
I already know about a case some years ago in Texas relating to trade secrets and the law. I know it because it was very relevant to technology. Basically the building code included proprietary specifications that were trade secrets of a particular company. Their plan was to have a racket where you had to pay them in order to comply with building code. They lost on the obvious basis that the law can not be secret.
Well, what if a law is not secret, but is so complicated that only a genius can comprehend it? There could easily be laws that involve extremely difficult mathematics which are solvable only by very good mathematicians. Is it reasonable or fair to expect an average person to be able to obey that law?
Here's how I see it. The government provides a high school education for free. They do not pay for any education above that. Also, people under the age of 18 don't even count as people, though I think they should be. Therefore, every law must be able to be understood by a high school graduate level of knowledge. If a law is unable to be understood with a high school graduate level of eduation, then it needs to be rewritten or invalidated because it's unreasonable to expect people to obey a law they can't understand even if they attempt to remove their ignorance.
First, you write a functional and/or markup language which is designed to describe laws in an inheritable, modular manner. Think L(aw)ML instead of XML.
Next, you ensure there is a tagging/linking mechanism for associating non-legislated precedent with existing law. Sort of a "this modifies/nullifies that" framework.
Third, you begin creating all new legislation and precedent in two formats: the existing model and the new model.
Fourth, designate certain narrow branches of law that are commonly used for "conversion" over time.
Fifth, you extend a framework of inheritance outward, along with a mechanism for local overrides based on particular factors (e.g., jurisdiction).
The key is maintaining two parallel frameworks for a while. It would be trivial to have a converter to create human-language-readable versions of LML laws, but not the reverse. Thus, actual judges and lawyers would have the tools available for new laws, but would not have to alter their understanding of law or legal language at any particular juncture.
I'm obviously greatly oversimplifying. My point is just that the task is not nearly so impossible as one would think. It would, however, require a multi-decade commitment.
That's a stop-gap measure, but I think it could work until we get the entire populace sufficiently educated to be able to read a law properly. See, I'm pretty sure that's the part that will make this effectively impossible. You'd need to keep a clear and consistent government agenda that spans multiple different administrations, all of whom will have different agendas.
If we could keep differing governments consistently dedicated to a single project over a course of decades, I'm pretty sure we'd be a lot better off. Think what would happen if absolutely every governmental administration in the next 20 years said, "OK, we're going to develop renewable energy for reals," and then actually stuck to the plan, irrespective of individual agendas. If you can figure out how to get that to happen, run for office.
I would much rather see mandatory legal classes in high school, ones that teach you how to read and interpret laws. In fact, that'd be a great course for general critical thinking education, as you force students to interpret logical documents and apply them to real-world scenarios.
You'd have to do a lot to make the job attractive, but I bet you could fill it.
You really hit the nail on the head. I posit that the only reasons the financial sector has implemented this sort of thing boil down to:
1. Smart technological people work in the financial sector.
2. People in the financial sector are paid ludicrous amounts of money.
3. The financial sector makes ludicrous amounts of money.
Note that 3 allows 2, which allows 1...
Also, the exact same laws can be interpreted differently in different jurisdictions - especially in plea negotiations. Possession of marijuana is the best example I know of this. In Louisville, KY, where I used to practice, a first offense could be dismissed if the defendant went to a brief counseling session. Other offenses would get the defendant a $25.00 fine and costs. In Owensboro, KY, about two hours away, it would be $250.00 fine and costs. In Shepherdsville, KY, just a half hour away, it would be 3 days in jail, minimum. In Brandenburg, KY, about 45 minutes away, it would be 7 days in jail, minimum - all for the same amount of marijuana. So, even within a single state, results vary greatly for this offense.
It's not just statutory law, either. In your example with the guy taking photos in an airport, there might not be a state statute against such action, but there very well might be federal statutes against it, and not necessarily the statutes you'd think to look for. Further, such action might be illegal due to some sort of regulation promulgated by the DOT or the TSA or some such, and those regs might not specifically make the action illegal. They might make it possible for an administrative law judge to exercise contempt-like powers to fine or detain the plaintiff, and the type of search you're postulating wouldn't have turned anything up at all.
And it's yet another big mess that means we can't have nice things.
My main point is that we definitely need to have cops check the law if you ask, because shit is getting out of hand. There are stories like this all too often lately.