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>I dont know if law can be reduced to code, and it should ideally be intelligible and accessible to the average person, it seems? Pick One: (a) There is only

• naasking 8y ago
  Can't you? Where's your proof?
  • _red 8y ago
    Take a relatively grey-filled topic like: One person has caused the death of another. Now show me the simple law covering that? People claiming "the law can be simple" are exactly the same as luddites who claim "why cant you just make computers work?!" - each side has no appreciation of the inherent complexities involved.
    • pnw_hazor 8y ago
      US Courts also hand down decisions based on equity which has little or nothing to do with law.
      • _red 8y ago
        Yes, Law is the nexus where Moral, Political, and Commercial interest all meet. Its going to be messy and complicated. But, it's common on tech boards to have a very loud minority of autistic-types claim that all these things can be solved by "code".
        • icebraining 8y ago
          Well, (real world) code is nothing if not messy and complicated :D
    • naasking 8y ago
      > Take a relatively grey-filled topic like: One person has caused the death of another. Now show me the simple law covering that? How is that "grey-filled"? There's murder and there's negligence, basically reflecting direct vs. indirect role in causing the death. Both scenarios consider intent to gauge the severity. So you have two knobs you can turn, but which cover the entirety of human-caused deaths. This is not a "grey-filled" scenario in the least. In fact, it's probably one of the most accessible and clear-cut cases of the law being reducible to simple rules. What's often not simple is fulfilling the standards of evidence required to know which rules to apply, ie. how much evidence is needed to establish mens rea? But that's not what you claimed. You claimed that you can't have simple, intelligible rules that cover many shades of grey.
      • _red 8y ago
        >There's murder and there's negligence And self-defense? or any of the dozens of other shades (car accidents?)? So two people getting in a fight in a bar and one unintentionally kills the other should receive the same sentence as car accident victim? Or accidental sports injury? You are attempting to simplify the world to simple morality tales. Hope you never have to live in such a world.
        • naasking 8y ago
          > And self-defense? Good point, being under threat is a third knob. Still very simple. > or any of the dozens of other shades (car accidents?)? Again, car "accidents" are always due to negligence somewhere, either mechanical failures making the manufacturer liable, or distraction on the part of a driver, or inebriation, etc. These are all very simple considerations that everyone understands. > So two people getting in a fight in a bar and one unintentionally kills the other should receive the same sentence as car accident victim? Killing someone in a bar fight is third degree murder, so I've already covered that. If your "car accident victim" had intent to cause harm with his vehicle, that's murder too.
          • _red 8y ago
            >Killing someone in a bar fight is third degree murder, so I've already covered that So in the space of a minimal online discussion you've gone from 2 classes of murder to now 5 classes (3 degrees of murder + negligence + under threat). Now continue this exercise for the next 250 years and you will eventually have a codification of the classes of murder which roughly mirrors our current laws. Which is to say, it will get progressively more complex.
• pault 8y ago
  s/Laws/Justice. You can have shades of gray and simple laws, but they will ensnare a lot of innocent people.