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>To reform unjust laws, people must be able to break those laws. Absolutely false. There are many bad or just silly laws on the books today that are scarcely i
by cookiecaper 11y ago
>To reform unjust laws, people must be able to break those laws.
Absolutely false. There are many bad or just silly laws on the books today that are scarcely if ever enforced. The problem with that is that no one will really put any effort into dealing with those "dormant" laws since they don't affect them in any way, but the state will drudge up such a law when they have to if they have it out for someone in particular. Laws that everyone ignores and are constantly violated because they aren't reflective of public morality can become a nightmare for the people that get prosecuted under them. They won't usually try this with high-profile people because the silliness would be obvious, but if you don't have media attention on yourself and they hate you, they will most certainly do this.
The best way to repeal a bad law is to have it strictly enforced. Once it starts affecting peoples' lives, especially powerful people, it will change pretty fast.
I'd love to see a US attorney issue arrest warrants for Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt due to Google's continuous flagrant violations of the CFAA and copyright law (though I acknowledge that their personal responsibility for such acts is now well outside the respective 2 and 5 year statutes of limitation). In my opinion, when a big shot violates a law, they should be locked up right away. They should be re-arrested every time the law is broken. In this way, each bad law would be cleaned up within a year or two.
- AnthonyMouse 11y agoMandatory enforcement is a good theoretical construct but it has an immediate practical problem. There are so many bad laws that it would require literally everyone to be brought up on charges. There would be no one to prosecute or judge cases because all the prosecutors and judges would be too busy defending themselves from their own charges. The only way to even consider strict enforcement is to fix the bad laws first, so before we can even discuss strict enforcement we would need a different way to eliminate bad laws. At which point you probably don't need it anymore.