I've come to a conclusion. It is pretty obvious.
Here it is: Laws that stray from simplicity inherently exist to create classist and racist and sexist barriers.
For ex: In many states, the law is "everybody can vote ... except criminals". And then, various interests work to ensure that certain classes of people are criminals.
Or, for example: "anyone can get unemployment checks ... so long as they fill out these forms, held a job for at least 30 days, etc" ... leaves out those who can't fill out forms, or who didn't have a job for 30 days. Guess who that tends to be?
Or, for example: "Anyone can get health care! But, only immediate life saving health care, otherwise doctors can refuse", benefits those who can afford it.
Or, "everybody deserves equal pay .... and they'll get it if they can prove they didn't", which again benefits the status quo.
Which are all reasons that I want a single rule for these things:
-- Are you a person? Then you can vote.
-- Are you a person? Then here's enough money to not die.
-- Are you a person? Then you can show to a clinic without paying.
-- Are you a person? Then you get paid for your work.
But, I'm simple like that -- I've got this crazy notion that people are equal.
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sounds like we need another form of government. something between capitalistic democracy and totalitarian communism. how would it work, and when can i move in?
ReplyDeleteand this is why I call myself an anarchist. Laws that cannot exist in a non-literate society aren't worth following.
ReplyDeleteso just "laws of nature" Derrick Sanders?
ReplyDeleteThat's probably an inaccurate use of the term anarchist...
ReplyDeleteTodd Sprang No. Culture can exist outside of written language.
ReplyDeleteMatt Johnson There are lots of different anarchies, just like any other broad category of societal structure. For example, how many variations of Deomcracies and Republics can you think of? Anarchism is no different, from the Syndacalists to the Erisians.
ReplyDeleteAlso, don't conflate anarchism and nihilism.
ReplyDeleteDerrick Sanders are you saying that laws should be simple enough to be understood and carried by oral traditions? This is a good way to think about if a law is simple enough, but we all know how badly a game of telephone can go.
ReplyDeletei'm no lawyer, but i'm not sure how you'd have a large modern society without written laws (though i agree brevity and simplicity and generality are good alignments of the law). codifying laws (implying to me "written down") seems the only way to go. how else would a cop in smallville know to arrest you for drinking in public where a cop in middletown would not? law is reduced to he-said-she-said or loudest-person-wins. not sure i want to live there.
ReplyDeleteMaybe we can still write laws into stone in public, so that they have to be short and simple and accessible to everyone, and hard to change.
ReplyDeleteDianne Harris Fair enough on the 'telephone' thing!
ReplyDeleteBoring deconstruction follows;
I try to stay away from the idea of "should be", but instead think in terms of 'typically'. We have, what, 8,000 years of written laws in few fragmented parts of the world, the places typically called "cradles of civilization". We have half a million years of being human beings. For most of human existence, a culture and its laws are indistinguishable; the concept itself of 'law' doesn't even have to exist. So no, it no longer becomes a matter of transmitting some list of rules via oral tradition (which does happen, I'm just saying it doesn't ALWAYS have to happen).
The idea of 'law' seems to go part-in-parcel with written language, agricultural trade, and 'civilizatio' in it's truest sense; There aren't too many cities that have been built that didn't leave behind a written language (but there are some).
So yeah, I identify as an Anarchist because I don't think that laws are really a part of the human condition.
Todd Sprang Large modern societies are not necessarily the apex of or the typical state of the human condition. N'est ce pas?
ReplyDeletenecessarily? no i guess not, but they do seem to be the norm. sweden, japan, ukraine, mexico, etc. a lot of them. the majority of the total count and the bulk of the world's residents, i think. (i'm assuming we're talking about national laws, so i'm thinking about nations, not local tribes or cities.)
ReplyDeletetypical? phew, tough one. i guess today, what i describe seems typical to me, but over the span of human existence, i guess where we are is pretty atypical and constantly changing/progressing.
definitely agree laws are not an inherent part of the human condition. however, sociologically speaking, i think to help forge a productive society, humanity does [have to] create laws. impossible to prove it, but i think [written] laws are inevitable in a group of more than a few hundred.
i'm honestly intrigued by the notion of "everyone should be equal under the law". cuz i don't think many people really truly deeply believe that. pretty much everyone i know thinks they're better than someone and lesser than someone else. that, i think, is inherent to humans and why communism fails.
As someone who handles laws for a living, I actually don't agree (with the OP). Laws become more complex since we have a complex society. Starting a nuclear power plant is a very complicated thing with many, many, many risks. So there are many thousands of laws related to doing so. They're not prejudicial, they're there for public safety in an exceedingly complex situation. Also, plenty of prejudicial laws are very, very simple. Also, plenty of laws beneficial to or protective of people's rights are very complicated (employer's non-discrimination act, the various civil rights acts, the voting rights acts, the americans with disabilities acts and their attendant regulations) because hateful pieces of garbage don't change their minds because of laws, they just start looking for loopholes.
ReplyDeleteJason Corley Its interesting: I'd suggest that making things complicated is what gives loopholes.
ReplyDeleteFor a poor analogy, consider Catan versus Carc. Catan has a bunch of rules that needs to be looked up, and people get into fights over interpreation.
Carc? Fewer fights over the rules, and rather fights because someone was a dick.
Or, corn and farm subsidies, design to help poor farmers but making agribusiness billions. Because it is too complicated to understand.
ReplyDeleteWilliam Nichols Just totally not true. If you made the rule "make your nuclear power plants safe!" then meltdowns would be a completely normal thing, we'd have five a year.
ReplyDeleteJason Corley evidence?
ReplyDeleteWe disagree, so please give either a compelling argument, evidence of your claim, or counter with the why in which my arguments and analogies do not work. Mine are wholly insufficient, so that shouldn't be terribly hard!
Fire departments. Before fire departments were regulated, fire brigades routinely employed arsonists to set fires for them to come put out for money, and routinely had brawls in the streets between rival fire brigades who had arrived at the same fire to try to put it out. They also used extortionate means to obtain payment. It's very hard to be a fire department, there's lots of regulations you have to follow. The reason for that is because there are lots of risks and complications that go into being a fire department.
ReplyDeleteJason Corley Fire departments are a great example of a public good, for sure. Its one we discuss around the table on a regular basis, as its has such great perverse incentives.
ReplyDeleteAnd what you are describing is exactly perverse incentives! I think what you are describing doesn't have to do with simplicity of laws, but with bad incentives.
Not in a mean way, but it is a bit of a bait and switch to say "Yeah, we need complicated laws governing people", and when asked why to say "because incentives are often messed up". It doesn't seem related -- I'm talking laws, and you responded with incentive mechanisms regarding public goods.
That is: Your position doesn't seem to be one that is against simple laws, but rather one that is about bad incentives. Do you disagree?
Sure, I mean, death to capitalism, smash the bosses, seize the means of production, but given our present social arrangements, it makes sense that (some) laws need to be very complicated to properly protect people. If you're arguing for revolution, definitely among the necessities for revolution would be an entirely new legal regime.
ReplyDeleteSince studying poverty in America from colonial times through the Great Depression, I have been known to say that society is a set of rules that let us know who to throw under the bus when things get hard.
ReplyDeleteJason Corley I'm not sure why you think I am arguing for revolution.
ReplyDeleteAlls I pointed out was that your argument was not actually about the necessity of complicated laws, but was instead about the structure of perverse incentives.
Jesse Cox No disagreement. And times are (probably) about to get very hard indeed. The complicated laws we have no make it (I think) super easy for rich/privileged/people with spare time to avoid the worse of what's going to come, and harder for those without all that.
ReplyDelete[ The rest of the conversation is super interesting and should feel free to continue! I got caught up on this one thing, and enjoyed seeing the rest, too! ]
ReplyDeleteWilliam, the statements you make in the post are not proposals for laws. They're proposals for overarching policies. Laws would be required to implement those policies, and those laws may need to be complicated to effectively achieve those goals.
ReplyDeleteYou seem to be expressing the view that you would like civil rights and government benefits to be granted unconditionally, because conditions on those benefits always disadvantage marginalized people. This is a perfectly reasonable view, although there are also some straightforward counter-arguments. However, the legal regimes undergirding these simple rules might well be complicated. E.g. you might still have a great deal of healthcare law regulating hospitals and doctors in order to enable anyone to walk into a clinic and get free care.
Sam Zeitlin I'm not sure I understand the distinction.
ReplyDeleteWouldn't it be a law that anyone can vote? Or, to use a more obvious example, that killing someone is a crime, period?
My claim is when we carve out exceptions to these -- only white people can vote, or its not a crime if you were fearful for your life -- that we make the law the servant of privilege. That's the claim, and I don't see how homicide isn't a law.
William Nichols My response was that necessity has to be evaluated either on actually existing realities (including but not limited to incentives) or in the sense of revolution. Given the profit motive, the actions of the fire brigades make perfect sense.
ReplyDeleteTo put it in another way, imagine a traffic code that consisted of this: "operate your vehicle safely!" People could (and would) drive on whatever side of the streets they wished, they would go whatever speed they felt like, they would signal when they wished and not signal when they wished, the construction of safe roads would be impossible (because you couldn't have any expectations of how people would actually drive on them), etc. (This is actually how early motoring was!) Because getting hundreds of millions of people to their destinations safely on an hourly basis is extremely complicated, the traffic code(s), and the laws and regulations for how to build a safe and acceptable road are very complicated.
The problem of simple laws, as it happens, is actually the first lesson in law school. Here is a version (apparently aimed at elementary schoolers) of the classic "No vehicles in the park" example. nhbar.org - www.nhbar.org/pdfs/novehinpark.pdf
ReplyDeleteJason Corley A little econ 101, though I'm sure you already know this.
ReplyDeletePeople respond to incentives. Incentives, additionally, aren't really that hard to change. The fire department now responds to incentives, and does not have the incentive to burn down my house. And they do't have that incentives, because we changed how they are funded. And we did it without having a revolution. We do it with economics.
Here's an example from freakonomics: An economist wanted to potty train his daughter. So, he offered her a M&M for each time she went to the potty by herself. She started using the potty, and he figured he was pretty smart. Parenting is easy!
And, predictably enough, she started going to the potty all the goddamn time, like every minute, because she could get M&Ms. That is, because the incentive structure was misaligned to the behaviors that he actually wanted.
Its not easy to align incentives correctly. For sure not! It takes time and effort and serious thought and analysis, but figuring it out and making it obvious then means that people know how to get what they want, and if they can see and understand it, then they can understand it.
Sam Zeitlin Reading. So far, I think this is a misunderstanding of the word "simple" to be "unclear".
ReplyDeleteSam Zeitlin I finished this. In each case, it is either obvious (ambulances are vehicles), or goes to poor definitions. (ie, vehicle is not defined.).
ReplyDeleteInstead, make the law "nothing motorized", and you solve all the issues as shown. I really don't see this as being about simple laws, but rather piss poor definitions.
Does that difference make sense to you?
William Nichols Right, but you're not proposing changing incentives, you're proposing changing very stringent, complex regulations to broad, simple statements, and alleging that this would create a just situation under the same incentives. Like, we didn't just start paying fire brigades - we also created stringent regulations about what firefighting volunteers could do, in what contexts could other organizations other than municipal employees fight fires, how were they to be insured against harm, etc. We went from am incredibly unjust situation controlled by simple or no laws, to a much more just situation controlled by very complex laws.
ReplyDeleteLike, the anarchist who says "we could also have fixed this situation without instituting complex laws by eliminating the profit motive" might also be correct (though they have fewer historical examples to back them up), but that, in our present capitalist dystopia, requires a revolution.
William Nichols Is it your view then, that it is just to permit the old man having the heart attack to die because, having instituted a simple rule of no motorized vehicles in the park, the ambulance may not be excepted when on a lifesaving mission? The police officer trying to stop a dangerous criminal on his way to kill his girlfriend? I mean, perhaps you do believe that it is more just for the old man to die and the dangerous criminal to kill than for the law about vehicles in the park to be made more complicated with exceptions, but it isn't obvious to me that you are correct, and I suspect it is not obvious to most people.
ReplyDeleteYou would also permit the horse and buggy since they're not motorized? Would you do so in the year 1878?
Again, we live in a complex society and simple rules can create injustice as much as complex ones can. There is nothing about simplicity that uniquely permits it to obtain justice.
Jason Corley In each of these cases, there is a known cost -- the ticket.
ReplyDeleteThe ambulance driver, let's pretend, works for an ambulance company. If they have a poilicy that say "drive over the park", and are willing to pay for it, then the ambulance driver doesn't pay for it when he drives over the park. If the company does not have such a policy and the driver goes over the park, then he pays the ticket.
There seems to be some conceptuion here that we can't do things that are illegal. That seems perfect ridiculous! There's a cost of commiting a crime, and if we know the cost (that is, if we can understand the law!), then we can make a decision.
If I cannot understand the law, then I cannot morally be held accountable for it. Maybe legally, I woudln't know -- you and Sam are the lawyers -- but morally? Heck no.
Why is it right for the law to exact a cost from someone who is doing something that we want them to be doing? It's easy in the examples currently under discussion to just say "pay the fine" because (1) the individuals work for big companies or the state, who can pay, and (2) the penalty is very small. But that doesn't need to be the case. What if it's a poor man rushing his wife to the hospital, and the cost of the ticket is back-breaking for him? Now it is the simple rule which creates classist injustice. There are also laws whose penalties are so high that we can't expect anyone to pay them as a cost of doing the right thing - for example, we could do the same song and dance about no vehicles in the park with your "killing someone is always the crime of murder" rule.
ReplyDeleteThe bottom line is, for every complexity, for every elaborate rule, for every provision of a long, tangled, statute, it is totally reasonable to ask why. Why is this here? Why is this necessary? How is this justified? Do the costs (including the inherent cost of complexity) outweigh the benefits? But to say, as a blanket rule across all of the law, that they never do, reflects a lot of unwarranted confidence.
Sam Zeitlin
ReplyDeleteI think the point here is if I cannot understand a law, that I cannot possibly be expected to abide by it.
And in actual cases, the exceptions to the laws are used for the rich and powerful. Here's an example: In Arlington, our parking meters are "all must pay, all may park". But, there's an exception: cops don't pay to park. This is a pretty clear example of an exception carved out to help the privileged.
To loop back to the parking example: I do not understand the claim that not having the money to violate a law means that it is morally acceptable to do so, as you seem to be making. Is that what you're saying?
And just as relevantly, Sam Zeitlin , my suggestion is that if you carve out an exception out of the goodness of your heart (poor people need not pay this), then rich assholes will abuse it, change it, and make it serve them.
ReplyDelete"I cannot understand a law, that I cannot possibly be expected to abide by it."
ReplyDeleteThis is not an absolute rule. Here is an example. You are a wealthy man starting a nuclear power plant business. The complex rules regulating nuclear power plants are important for safety and environmental protection. You should hire a lawyer to take care of this. Your inability to understand the regulatory framework is not an excuse for not taking the required precautions and getting a permit.
Laws that primarily regulate people who lack the education or the resources to navigate complex regimes should strive to be simple and straightforward - or to have extensive resources available to help people out. But "cannot understand a law" presumably doesn't mean "made no effort to find out what the law was."
"And in actual cases, the exceptions to the laws are used for the rich and powerful."
In all cases? In most cases? How would you possibly support this claim? To provide one counter-example, there are many government services that require a fee, unless you can't afford the fee, in which case the fee is waived.
And is the cop example carried out to help the privileged? Perhaps it's just an acknowledgement that cops are state employees who need to park to do their job, and it's a waste of time to have them pay money from the city's coffers back into the city's coffers for parking fees.
"I do not understand the claim that not having the money to violate a law means that it is morally acceptable to do so."
That is not my claim. My claim is that a man with a dying wife is acting ethically when he takes a shortcut driving through the park to get her to the hospital as fast as possible. We do not want him to be forced to choose between saving his wife's life and paying the fine. To drive this point home, I am asking you to imagine that the man is poor enough, and the fine high enough, that it would have serious financial consequences for him. Why should the law punish him for doing the right thing? Is that just?
Hold on a sec. Let's back up.
ReplyDeleteThere's two things going on here.
1. Your claim that a Rich Man should hire lawyers. While this is (sorry) self-serving, I don't actually disagree with it in principle. Money can (and should!) help us know things. That being said, I've very much not been talking about laws that apply to industry -- the lawyers brought them up. I've been discussing the laws that apply to people in their every day lives.
On city services: if they have a fee unless you cannot afford them, then they should simply be free. Anytime you have to prove you are poor, you've put up a barrier that will keep out people who need the service. You've made it harder to help the people you claim to want to help. That is, making poor people prove they are poor still benefits the privileged.
Its the same reason a lot of public libraries are getting rid of late fines; it reduces use by the poor who cannot afford the ten cents a day. That is the better solution. Turns out, it is also the simpler solution.
2. Cops are privileged. If you really want to argue that cops aren't a privileged subset of society, well, its not an argument I can have and maintain my calm. If it was all city workers, maybe, but it ain't: it is the privilege of cop cars.
3. As for the dying wife, I forgot something relevant here. The fee for driving on the park isn't arbitrary; if it is done right, it is the average cost to the city of a car driving through the park. That is, it should be the estimate economic externality of your actions. This should include -- though probably doesn't -- landscaping, repair, and, of course, the death of pedestrians who were killed by cars.
Which is to say: Don't drive on the park. Not because of the fine, but because you are likely to kill someone. And, well, don't kill people seems pretty basic.
My wife -- whom I adore and love -- is not worth the life of two pedestrians. I am uncertain if taking her to the hospital is worth the life of one pedestrian. I'd call the ambulance, which is not only safer but would get her there faster.
That is: I reject the claim that it even is the right thing to drive over the park.
It feels like I moved the goalposts in (3). I don't think I did, but if you think I did, lemme know.
ReplyDeleteAnother great example: Men in this bathroom, women in this one.
ReplyDelete1.A This is good! A lot of what I've been trying to convey here is that you have a narrow claim (or several related narrow claims) which you are presenting as an extremely broad claim. So, now we can cut a big chunk of law out of the picture. You want simplicity in laws that apply to people in their everyday lives. I'm not completely sure what that means - maybe it means one's private life as opposed to one's professional life? But it's a start.
ReplyDelete1.B You said: in practice, laws with exceptions favor the privileged. I said, no, there are many exceptions which favor the nonprivileged. You said: any law with an exception that favors the nonprivileged should be changed to treat everyone equally, so we don't have to determine who is and is not privileged.
First answer: What you are saying is non-responsive. You made claim describing the world. I provided a counterexample about the world. You responded with a normative claim saying that those laws should look different.
Second answer: not all exceptions which favor the marginalized require you to prove that you are poor. For example, consider FDIC or other banking rules that provide special benefits or protections to bank accounts that have x amount of money or less in them. For another example, consider an exception to the rule against racial discrimination in hiring to permit affirmative action for historically disadvantaged groups.
Third answer: there are benefits as well as costs to requiring people to prove that they are entitled to a government benefit. If you make the benefit available to everyone, it becomes more expensive to provide. Either every beneficiary gets less, or it trades off with some other spending priority.
2. Cops are city workers who frequently need to park in metered spaces to do their jobs. If there are other city workers that this also applies to, then they should get a similar benefit. Presumably other city agencies whose workforces have similar needs have some other kind of arrangement with the city government to deal with parking fees. Of course, it might be that this is just corruption, or special concessions to the police union. I don't know the details of the situation. But it's not an inherently crazy rule.
3. Don't fight the hypothetical. If you use your imagination, I'm sure you can tweak the scenario until driving your dying wife through the park is the fastest and safest option for everyone concerned.
Now let's return. The man is in court. You are the judge. You say: "the fine is based on the estimated cost to the city of your actions, including the estimated share of the value of all lives killed if people drove through the park all the time, however that's calculated, which is why it's quite high, and not a trivial fee that people just accept like a toll." He says "your honor, I did what I had to do. No one got hurt, I saved her life. But I can't pay this fine. I won't be able to make rent this month. I won't be able to make my car payment."
What would you do?
"I guess you'll be taking the bus"
ReplyDeleteMaybe this is from living in Arlington (though, granted, OKC for 25 years), but driving is a privilege, not a right. You do not have a right to car ownership.
Granted, we also need to structure society such that cars are not necessary. A lot of places are borked on that, but that is not the point. The point is that driving is not a right.
2. On cops, an analogy: You went into law, I presume, because you like to argue and analyze. I studied philosophy because I care about truth, and like to argue. I wanted to be better at it.
ReplyDeleteWhy, then, does one become a cop?
Also, that laws should look different is precisely the initial point! This is not non-responsive, it is the initial claim.
ReplyDeleteOh, that's a good one Saffire Rainbo You can have this contraception, but only if you are at least 18. Othewise, you can only have this one. You can pay for it at a store, or PP will give it to you for free but look, we've gotten rid of them.
ReplyDeleteHow about all contraception is available to everyone? Want the pill? Here it is! Want some condoms? Here'a a dozen.
So, to recap: guy saves his wife's life and doesn't hurt anyone. You impose a fine that will cause the guy lose his car, his house, and let's throw in his job (because in much of America, losing your car means losing your job) because he violated a "no vehicles in the park" ordinance. This only happened because he was poor. If he was wealthier, he could have paid the fine comfortably and moved on with his life. Your view is that this is a just outcome, and that any exceptions or complications to the law would inevitably benefit the privileged at the expense of the non-privileged.
ReplyDelete"the minimum wage is $15 an hour. Unless you work in a restaurant, or are a prisoner ... "
ReplyDeleteException carve outs that hurt the least able to defend themselves.
Sam Zeitlin Not quite, no.
ReplyDeleteThe guy statistically murdered, say, 0.1 people. That's what the fine is for. We don't put you in prison (usually) for statitical murder, but we sure as hell should fine you.
And you're right, our judicial system is much more capricious, arbitrary, and pernicious.
So, when you say "Drive through the park" do you mean "There is a road that the car is driving on but it just isn't supposed to (like an access road)" or do you mean "The car is going off road through a grass/landscaped area causing lots of damage"? Because it kind of feels like that makes a difference, and I initially assumed you meant the first, but one of the comments you just made seems to imply the second...
ReplyDeleteAlso... I should just not read these threads. I studied philosophy because I found it interesting as a subject, but I stopped because I hate arguing :P
Example of the arbitrary nature of law enforcement: Drunk driving. If it happens to me, I'm told not to do it again. If it happens to someone who looks less like me, they are murdered.
ReplyDeleteOf the capricious nature of the judicial system: I've got a family member who was convinced of a B&E. They let him hang out in society for 2 years before putting him in jail for 18 months. That was long enough to start making a life for himself, then boom disaparated.
In both these cases, there's no telling what the outcome will be for committing a crime. At the least the hypothetical statistical murderer who loves his wife more than virtue knew what he was doing.
Sam you can never say that the guy didn't harm anyone. The rut his tire left could cause someone to trip fall and die. The guy could have scare a cat out into the street causing a car accident. ect ect ect. actions have consequences, not all of them can be known, but on average they can be estimated. Actuaries. People need to be willing to take responsibility for their actions.
ReplyDeleteI can't believe this has gotten to moral luck. But, there it is: I do not believe the law should reward moral luck. Or luck of any kind.
ReplyDeleteWilliam Nichols I disagree with your characterization of "statistical murder," but that's a separate conversation. If that's such a hot button, let's remove that. The fine doesn't incorporate the risk of pedestrian death, which is no greater in the park than on a normal road. Instead, the fine purely reflects maintenance costs, plus the aesthetic costs of noise and nuisance, and perhaps some extra to make sure the fine is high enough to deter the average driver and prevent them from treating it as a toll. Do you still wish to impose the fine?
ReplyDeleteYour examples of bad exceptions don't really get us anywhere. Exceptions can be used for good or for ill. When you see an exception, you should ask "what is the purpose"? If there's no good answer, then you should oppose the exception.
As for the justice system, it has both good and bad features. When you are faced with a gigantic and complicated institution that's creating a lot of bad outcomes, it can be easy to pick the wrong part(s) of the system to blame. This is a big problem, because it means your fixes won't work.
In our system, the man in my example would be facing a range of fines and penalties. The judge would be able to tailor the fine based on his situation - both his culpability and his finances. The man would also be able to raise a legal defense to the fine: necessity - driving through the park was necessary to prevent a greater evil (the wife's death). Even if he didn't know about the necessity defense beforehand, a judge would recognize and apply it from the account I gave above.
Sam Zeitlin I think you absolutely need the statistical death.
ReplyDeleteOtherwise, if I'm the dude, I'm asking: Is it worth losing all my shit to save my wife? The answer is obvious. Things are replaceable, and while spouses probably are, it takes a whole lot longer.
Without that, there's no oompf. You remove the moral consideration, and that makes it meaningless.
With 95%+ of cases going to plea bargain, and given the hourly rate of lawyers, and the ridiculous underfudning of public defenders, are we really gonna claim the guy would, as a practical matter, get a fair trial? That his lawyer would look at his paperwork for more than a minute?
There's a lot wrong with our laws and how we implement them. One maybe funding the different sides of a case differently. Another is maybe arresting people who weed. A bunch of others, which destroy lives, and do so largely based on how much money or privilege you can bring to the table.
William Nichols The key question is: why should we, as a society, ask him to make that choice? Why can't we just say: we shouldn't fine people who take a vehicle in the park to save someone's life? They behaved the way we want them to behave, and we don't want to punish them for it?
ReplyDeleteThe question of whether procedural aspects of the criminal justice system would ensure an unjust outcome is separate from the question of whether the underlying law is just. Unjust procedures do not justify unjust laws.
I can't spend much more time on this conversation, interesting as it is, so let's try this another way as my final thought
ReplyDeleteWhy do laws become complicated?
Typically, we start with a simple rule that we can all agree sounds like a good idea. But then things happen (more than just the thing I'm suggesting).
Some people come and say: hey! Your law applies to me, but it shouldn't because the reasoning behind passing the law doesn't apply to me.
So we make some carve-outs for them. We could also try revising the definition, which can have a very similar effect. Which one is better depends on the situation.
Then we put the rule into effect, and we see that people try to work around the rule. So we change the rule to prevent the workaround.
We also see that there are unintended bad effects of the rule, so we make some more changes and exceptions to try to avoid those situations.
Then we get the edge cases. The rule seemed so clear! But somehow the problems get harder and harder. These cases go to court, if there's enough at stake, and the judicial decisions become part of the law.
Now the law is kind of a mess, but at least it produces just outcomes more often. For most people, knowing the simple, straightforward rule is enough to guide their behavior. But for others things are more complicated. For those who can access the law, the information is out there. For those who can't, we've done our best to make the effects of the law track most people's intuitions about what is fair and just. Our hope is that this will create more just outcomes overall than a one-size-fits-all rule that we KNOW creates unfairness and needless suffering in many situations.
( dealing with crap. Likely not to respond before tomorrow because reasons. )
ReplyDeleteAs an aside, this is a really good argument to not have civil find in the first place.
ReplyDeleteWhich I'd be completely ok with, really. That's the de facto privileged position anyway.
For every "$15 is the minimum wage except for kids or prisoners" unjust exception, I can find a "you may hire who you want to work for you except if you are a racist who only wants to hire white people" just exception. It's not the exception that makes the justice or injustice, it's not the simplicity that makes the justice or injustice. Both complexity and simplicity can be deployed in just or unjust ways. The idea that exceptions ALWAYS protect the privileged is empirically untrue (except insofar as the whole structure of the law is set up to protect the privileged, which, again, leads more to a call for revolution than to a call for simplcity).
ReplyDelete"You can dump toxic waste however you want" vs. "you can only dump toxic waste if you can follow these 10,000 rules for doing so safely" is not a just rule by its simplicity versus a just rule undermined by 10,000 unjust exceptions and requirements. It's an unjust rule versus a just regulatory structure. (And before you say that this doesn't apply to personal lives, every person in the average home produces around 4 pounds of household toxic waste per year, and many produce much more.)
Laws only matter if you're looking for consistency or predictability.
ReplyDeleteThe simplest "law" is "We do what Hank says, and if we did something Hank doesn't like, he makes us fix it."
You can run a small society on this. Tribe? Village? Sure, no problem. Even an empire, as long as "Hank" is sufficiently impressive.
But coordinating larger groups and longer times is powerful. Ever notice how most empires don't manage to get passed on to the grandchildren?
The Hebrew word Torah is often translated as Law, but in many contexts it reads more like "civilization." Managing to get a system going where "Hank" has been entirely abstracted gives a lot more continuity and breadth than was possible before.
Common Law gets rid of "Hank" entirely but tries to maintain continuity through an accumulating body of precedents.
Statutory law is an effort to codify this stuff so we can actually try to do things with it instead of just getting buried under history.
We can do stupid injust things at every level.
Complicated laws may make it easier to do one thing while believing you're doing something else.
I have a personal theory that the modern strangeness is not that people are or aren't racist, classist, sexist...it's that we now have a large body of people who both are and strongly believe they aren't.