Why should that apply only to people vs corporations? How about people vs government? Should I be expected to read all the laws, and if not a reasonable expectations, laws are invalid?
Somebody is sure as hell trying and I'm honestly impressed by the commitment and content produced from their effort, behold: @crimeaday https://twitter.com/crimeaday
Because laws apply to you whether or not you agree to be bound by them. Your consent is not required.
(I do agree it would be great for our laws to be more readable, but I don’t see how society could function with as low a limit on legislation as you’re suggesting.)
I'm not sure about where the upper bounds of legal complexity should be, but I do have at least one thought on how to limit the overall complexity, at least for the average citizen.
Eliminate all victimless crimes in their entirety. If no third party is harmed or unreasonably endangered, there shouldn't be any reason to fine or incarcerate someone. This basically eliminates all 'possession of' crimes that are so often misused by police to inflict all kinds of harm. (Good example being getting arrested for some marijuana in the car leading to car impound and ludicrous fees to get it released.)
I agree, but I don't think that's relevant. Those laws are pretty well known, and their problem isn't obscurity or complexity, its injustice of outcomes.
I disagree primarily due to the way plea deals are handled. You can be innocent of any wrongdoing and still have to take a deal that results in jail time to avoid losing the rest of your life. If there is no charge, there is no need to plea. And, if there is no charge (and therefore probably no arrests being made) there is no looking for evidence of some other thing. (Imagine someone arrested for Marijuana, but it turns out they also happen to have some party drugs somewhere. Game over.)
That said, these laws are complex. [0]This is a felony scoresheet from Florida that shows how things get tallied up. Looking closely you can see the extreme impact of plea deals in sentencing, and the way multiple charges get added together.
The return of mens rea requirements and sharp curtailing of strict liability crimes would solve some of the effect of "surprise laws" at the cost of making enforcement and convictions more difficult - which some to many would call a feature and not a bug.
I'm firmly in the camp that convictions should be difficult to get. I dislike the manipulations of the legal system that universally work against the average person and for the large entities or wealthy who can afford expertise.
Jury Nullification is one such example. Threats of life in prison (even if innocent) unless you plea down to a lesser charge is another.
From a Catholic perspective, laws are only valid if they're promulgated popularly by the state. If the state makes a law and doesn't openly share it, the law does not need to be followed.
Only sharing because the Church has done extensive writing on legal theory and because the Church is transnational -- it's beyond the jurisdiction of any country and predates every country currently on earth.
In an ideal world unused laws would be scrapped and complicated laws would be simplified. One could even come up with a criterion: the entire law book should be readable in 10 hours by a layperson.
None of us know which of our actions constitute a crime. Even worse, in many cases neither does anyone until someone goes to a court and a precedent is set. This is a terrible system.
Naw, you can have regulations for specific industry. They just wouldn't be relevant unless you are in such an industry, and should be organized enough that you can read and understand them when going into an industry, and have clear boundaries of when they become relevant in the simplified general law.
Also, the concept conflicts with the idea of local government and basically requires a large central world government. I feel like thr idea of simplified laws is mostly an impractical pipe dream propagated by people who don't like that they can't dump poison into local rivers or sell people scams that harm them.
Here is how we can get a proper measure of the problem: how often are people harmed by complex contracts they signed but didn't understand, vs how often are people harmed by laws they didn't know existed? And how often were those people doing something meaningfully harmful to someone else and should have known better on basic moral grounds?
