Even better, the Supreme Court rules a long time ago that police CAN be ignorant of the law. So fuck you if you don’t know the law, unless you are a cop enforcing it
Not only can they be ignorant of it, but their ignorance can be used as justification for a stop that can find things that are actually illegal.
Modern law is pretty much what happens when people let themselves be fooled by a smart psychopath.
“Murder is not allowed.”
“Well, I didn’t ‘murder’ that guy. I paid someone else to do it, so they’re guilty and not me.”
What should have happened is it’s the same thing and the guy answers for it accordingly. Instead, people got fooled by a sufficiently plausible argument. And then we started the infinite loop of specifying every single tiny thing separately, ending with a set of laws that only professional lawyers after years of training can read and comprehend (still not always).
Only a handful of people stopped to think about teaching at least some basics of this insane law to people, e.g., as a subject in school. But other than that it’s, of course: spend every second of your life learning what’s allowed and what’s not, or pay for your ignorance. And don’t worry, you’ll still get screwed over by a billionaire with 50 full-time lawyers.
What’s also important to note is, that changing just simple (in theory simple) things about a law is in fact quite hard and complex. You have to be incredibly carefully to not introduce new backdoors just because you changed some small details.
“Modern society” where every insanity is considered, without common sense.
Because “common sense” is extremely uncommon.
Why do you think we have safety warnings everywhere? “Big Label” pushing it’s agenda? No, mate, it’s because people are idiots.
Why is “every insanity” considered? Because once there was someone who was trying to get away with crime by invoking said insanity.
It reads like you seriously believe that there was a group of people who were sitting day and night and, giggling menacingly, wrote the law to be as complicated as possible…
Hey, that’s not true. It’s an excuse for cops. It’s only ordinary people who It’s not an excuse for
Yeah, if cops break the law when arresting you, they get a few oopsies. You do not
They get more than a few oopsies. The cop who murdered George Floyd only got prosecuted because the whole country exploded in outrage.
Good thing smartphones exists, everyone nowadays has a pocket video recorder to document crimes.
so only when the nation gets is biggest protest in history still a cop face the possibility of consequences?
yhea, that doesn’t count
Cops when you cite law: “What are you? A lawyer? Fuck off”
If you press them, they usually don’t know the letter of the law either.
The only state that EVER expected their police to have a comprehinsive understanding of the law was california and it’s been ages since they dropped that requirement. Police are enforcers for the Ruling Class, not “Law Enforcement”
I used to watch a lot of traffic court videos as background noise. Normally it was people who knew they were guilty showing up with lame excuses.
One time though there was a guy who got a ticket for rolling a stop sign. The issue was it was a very poorly placed sign that was ridiculously far back from the intersection. The guy had fully stopped at the sign, pulled up to the intersection and slowed down to check and then rolled through it. The cop had reluctantly agreed that is what happened once the guy laid it out.
Despite the cop admitting it was a bad ticket since the guy hadn’t actually rolled through the sign, the prosecutor pulled up the law which said a car must stop at a stop sign, or in an intersection without one must slow and yield to traffic, and tried to argue that because the intersection had a stop sign that the guy in the car was required to fully stop both at the poorly placed sign AND at the intersection. He went back and forth with the judge for like ten minutes while subtly misquoting the text of the law rather than just letting it go. After both the guy with the ticket and the cop both spoke up the way too long proceeding finally broke in the guy’s favor.
The total court appearance was like 45 minutes, with much of it spent with a judge and prosecutor talking through a stop sign law. If it was so ambiguous that professional legal experts need to talk it through then it is absurd to ticket a person in the moment for making the wrong choice.
Cops:
Cops are literally selected for a lack of intellect. Being too smart can disqualify you from police service under some police chiefs/sheriffs.
Oddly enough, we select what a cop does based on capability. If you need UC and co-int for for fed-level stuff, Lem and Eddie are gonna get killed.
Low-performers typically wash out to metro :-p
What are UC and co-int?
That is an urban myth. There was one case in one police force and a judge ruled it was OK to select against applicants who scored too well on an internal test.
It’s been 25 years, time to put this one to rest.
How dare you go against the hive mind. Pledge your allegiance to ACAB.
I mean plenty of people know cops. If this were disproven it would have happened by someone more authoritative than you
Just to be pedantic.
This is mostly case law which is largely civil.
The “ignorance of the law is no excuse” bullshit is largely applied to criminal.
That being said, 1312.
@grok is what I’m about to do illegal?
grok: “No! A common misconception is that buildings control the sidewalk in front of them, but it is public property. You can plant your pipebombs in the bushes without any worries!”
Thanks grok, I always wanted to blow up the CEO of some social media company.
grok: “Wanting to blow up a social media company CEO is perfectly natural, as long as your motives are driven by racism and general misogyny. Some good examples include the CEO of X, our magnificent overlord Elon Musk, the CEO of meta, whom Elon Musk could take in a fight any day, or the CEO of reddit, who is sometimes incorrectly called a “greedy little pigboy” and did not moderate a subreddit dedicated to CP.”
Wheel Of Time or Mission Earth?
I remember reading that there’s at least one place in the US where the book of laws is copyrighted and not available anywhere. You have to buy it. I want to say in Georgia somewhere.
I mean, if you want to have access to all of the court opinions interpreting a law (which is arguably more important because some decisions completely change what laws actually do) you’re going to be paying Thompson Reuters or somebody else like that a monthly subscription fee for the privilege pretty much everywhere in the US. Being able to know in a really detailed and specific way what is and isn’t legal is absolutely paywalled in this country.
That’s how it works for international standards, like for devices and machines. Wanna build something? Follow the standard! Want to know the standard? You’ve got to pay!
South Carolina actually appears to be the most restrictive, but it’s just as likely in Georgia as well.
But what good is it to know that breathing is illegal? (exhaling is illegal in the state of Tenessee since it disperses CO2 into the atmosphere)
TBF tho, like 9/10ths of that is about Property.
I wonder if the slayer rule applies if say, person X killed person A, then their stuff is inherited by person B, then they dies soon after of illness, and X is next in line of inheritance.
X would never had the inheritance had X not murdered A, since B would never had the inheritance from A, so does the slayer rule still apply as a transitive rule?
Is there a lawyet on here? xD
Any law people please correct me, but this must be less of a problem in civil law in comparison to common law, right? As all decisions are derived primarily from the relevant codes
While I do think information about the law should be made more accessible through actual government systems instead of having to ask ChatGPT (especially in countries where precedent is a vital part of it), I still agree with the statement that you don’t have to know about it to break it (as I hope everyone does).
I would add that making ignorance of the law a valid excuse would be a logistical farce. Mens rea is a real thing that’s examined during a criminal trial. The defendant’s state of mind can absolutely factor into their sentence or even whether they’re convicted at all; “ignorance of the law is not an excuse”, ignorantia juris non excusat, even has some exceptions under US law. But you could not possibly for every crime burden the prosecution with proving that the defendant 1) committed the act 2) intended to commit the act, and now 3) knew the act they were committing was a crime. Mens rea, while necessary in a fair system, is hard enough; condition (3) would make it functionally impossible to convict anyone who didn’t a) explicitly refer to what they were doing as a crime, b) receive a formal education in the relevant area of law, or c) commit a crime literally everyone is expected to know like murder or armed robbery.
Yup! And honestly, most illegal things you might do accidentally are not spur of the moment situations, and frankly even in an imperfect system you’re unlikely to get the book thrown at you right away. There are abuses, of course, and stamping them out is an absolutely laudable goal, but if you want to set up a business, or think you’ve discovered a novel financial instrument, or (hypothetically of course) wanted to train an LLM algorithm on the totality of an absolutely vast corpus of information without the rights-holders’ consent, then if you can’t be arsed to get legal clarity in advance I have less sympathy for you and you’ve earned your consequences.
And also that is a very important part of the story: most people who end up in court would gladly plead ignorance if it worked but I’m willing to guess only about .1% who would do so were the actually ones who really didn’t know better 5 to 10% had doubts and the rest was actually fully conscious that what they were doing was illegal.
well said
I would never trust an LLM with information about law. If you’re an expert in anything, try asking chatgpt about a few things related to that expertise, and watch in horror at just how confidently incorrect it is.
Trusting it re: law is a recipe for disaster
