I can't find your quote, and I have a hard time understanding the context. It suggests that everything is forbidden, no? Or that the category of "forbidden" is

I can't find your quote, and I have a hard time understanding the context. It suggests that everything is forbidden, no? Or that the category of "forbidden" is defined as the two subcategories "-by law" and "-by decency". The construction fits in the context of traditional English law - "Everything which is not forbidden is allowed". Similar statements include White's rule of totalitarianism - "Everything which is not forbidden is compulsory", as well as several "jocular" (quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_which_is_not_forbidden_is_allowed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_which_is_not_forbid...) national stereotypes. > we try to regulate very complex and ambigous area of human interactions by the strict rules That describes most laws, including inheritance, marriage, and corporate law. I don't think there's anything notably different about anti-harassment laws that hoist it out of our existing legal process. The rest of your comment has little or nothing to do with the article. For example, you comment that "most violent cases of sexusal harrasment can and should be punished while for the less obvious things we need to rely on personal integrity and good manners." The article, by comparison, gives an example of sexual harassment that was legal until the 1970s - "an employee who lost her job for refusing to sleep with her boss had no way to succeed in court". This was not violent sexual harassment, which means your view is that we "rely on personal integrity and good manners" to keep from having workplaces where the boss can fire employees who don't provide sex on demand. How is that supposed to work? Why didn't it work before the 1970s? You also mention "simple nice gesture like grabbing someone's arm" as a hypothetical. The article mentions a real-world case "in which a military serviceman was discharged because another serviceman complained that the man had looked into his eyes for too long in the mailroom." It sketches out the different viewpoints that can go into a legal (or quasi-legal system like the two internal Harvard procedures mentioned) that help balance those different factors. The final paragraph includes "Recently, Harvard Law School broke from the university, announcing different procedures for its own students, which include providing lawyers to those who cannot afford them and hiring independent adjudicators with legal training (like retired judges) to hear and decide cases." Why did that conclusion, or anything in the article, make you think of a "police state"?