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Chinese farmer 'studies law for 16 years' to defeat dumping of hazardous waste
- stephsmithio 7y agoThis is a great story. If only AdChoices would stop dumping all over the site, so I could read it to the end.
- retrocryptid 7y agoboth my father and a dear friend gave me some great advice... "if you can, go to law school. even if you're not a practicing lawyer, it's very useful to know how they think." one friend commented "law school teaches you about the operating system of society"
- Ancalagon 7y agoI would agree. Too bad it costs an arm and a leg these days to go...
- ScottFree 7y agoI'm surprised there isn't a Khan Academy style online class for learning aspects of American law.
- ummonk 7y agoThere are online degree programs which are accepted by some state bar associations.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y agoooh, gonna find that out later.
- lonelappde 7y agoBarbri isn't free, but it's much cheaper than law school. You don't need school to learn the law, you just need to borrow and buy some books.
- Cynddl 7y agoIt depends on the country. I'm assuming you're from the US, but (law) education in Europe is generally much more affordable.
- Insanity 7y agoYup, here (Belgium) it costs the same as anything else. :)
- rolltiide 7y agoI’d go just to learn the latin Would definitely fill in the pieces from some of my own study of law
- Deinos 7y agoA couple undergraduate classics courses would be far cheaper and much more useful in that regard. On a similar note, studying Greek and Latin in college gave me a large leg up in other areas of study (e.g. I had a much greater mastery of English and writing, programming language syntax was far easier to learn, etc.). Classical languages are far more useful than people realize.
- heavenlyblue 7y agoHow's Greek and Latin related to programming language syntax?
- elliottkember 7y agoI studied Latin and to me it’s the syntax that’s interesting and useful for this career. Subject-object-verb structure, and the words change depending on their usage (declension/conjugation). Picking apart a sentence in a foreign language and making sense of the structure is a lot like programming so it’s a transferable skill
- roel_v 7y ago"Picking apart a sentence in a foreign language and making sense of the structure is a lot like programming so it’s a transferable skill" ... yeah no those are nothing alike at all...
- elliottkember 7y agoDebugging, then. I don’t know. Your mileage may vary.
- 7y ago
- crimsonalucard 7y agoOperating systems are suppose to assist the user. In this and most cases the law is a system of oppression. 16 years is a travesty. Economics and science are the true operating systems of society. You go to law school to learn security exploits.
- lone_haxx0r 7y agoUsing security exploits is non-coercive. Law is coercive. You go to law school to learn how people convince other people to force other people to do things.
- crimsonalucard 7y agoWhy people follow law is not part of what you learn in law school. That is an anthropological phenomenon that has to do with culture, society and biology. What you learn in law school is less fundamental and more specific to the system at hand. You learn contracts, property, criminal law, constitutional law, legal methods, civil procerude... torts... You learn the specifics so that the system can be exploited. If you think people who study law have some deep insight on the true nature of civilizations and the rules that humans operate under you are completely wrong. Questions like which system is better? Communism or capitalism? Dictatorship or Democracy? Are not what you study in law school. Remember law school is about security exploits.
- bjourne 7y agoI think you have not studied law.
- ajdlinux 7y agoPutting aside the question of what they do and don't teach in law school - over in my part of the world, where, as is normal in the British Commonwealth, law is normally studied at an undergraduate level, it's fairly standard for law students to double major in the humanities or social sciences, where those questions do indeed get asked from a non-legal and more anthropological and cultural perspective.
- solidsnack9000 7y agoI've been reading "Lectures on Jurisprudence", a collation of lecture notes from a course Adam Smith gave in the 1760s. It is somewhat puzzling phrasing but seems to be a very structured introduction to the law, addressing questions like: * What are the ways recognised by the law in which people acquire property? One way is simply by holding it for a long time; another is by receiving it, as through an inheritance; a third is when property results from other property, as when an apple tree produces apples. * What do "rights" mean in a legal context and where do they originate from? Some are intrinsic, some are the result of agreements. * What are the laws of marriage and inheritance and how have they changed over time?
- tasty_freeze 7y agoI don't understand how this is great advice. You might as well say: if you can, go to med school so that when you have to deal with the medical establishment, you know how it works. Spend years as a carpenters apprentice so when you buy a house you will be able to recognize the quality/problems it has. etc
- 1123581321 7y agoIt’s because (according to this thinking), a legal background combines well with almost anything else you end up doing as long as terms, contracts, long documents and regulations are unavoidable. Other fields are also useful, and the rigor from studying, e.g., medicine, may be useful for the discipline it instills, but aren’t as ubiquitous and scary to laypersons as law. It’s why you see a lot of COOs and CEOs with some legal background or at least familiarity.
- deskglass 7y ago> It’s why you see a lot of COOs and CEOs with some legal background or at least familiarity. An alternative hypothesis based on people I know - traditionally, smart/middle-to-high class people pick between medicine, law, and finance, with law school being the default. Then many of these people realize they don't like practicing law so they transition into something else.
- 1123581321 7y agoThat’s reasonable. I think law’s especially well suited to that, too, because the lawyer job market is in tatters compared to medicine right now (no idea about finance.) The comparative advantage of using the degree to complement another field can be worth more than actually practicing.
- ww520 7y agoYou don't have to go to law school. Just take a commercial law course in a college.
- clSTophEjUdRanu 7y agoOff-topic, but that time lapse of Beijing smog makes me angry.
- AlexCoventry 7y agoMy first thought on reading this headline and seeing it's from The Independent was "That's terrible! How are we any better than China?"
- an_ko 7y agoI think it's really fucked up that people have to study law. I'm expected to live by a complex set of rules that only a few understand well enough to reliably navigate, where any transgression might ruin the rest of my life? Almost nobody I know has even read any law. Whenever I have, it has been a frustrating exercise in deciphering jargon and ridiculously long sentences. It leaves me a modest degree of terrified to do anything, because everything is probably illegal by some interpretation of some corner of some strange grammar used in some paragraph or other somewhere.
- Retric 7y agoI find laws to generally be very readable, the issue is case law is monkey patching the laws as written making all specific interpretations up for debate. At a minimum studying all the related Supreme Court cases is effectively required. Luckily there are only so many of those: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_United_States_Supreme_Court_cases https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_United_States_Supre... After that you’re still going to need to talk to a lawyer, but you should be able to keep up with what’s being said.
- internetman 7y agoNote that China does not use Common law. Civil law is much more rule based; similarities in cases can not be used to explain each other. Having case XYZ the rule for XY may be disabled by a rule for Z (being defined in a completely different law book). https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/92/Map_of_the_Legal_systems_of_the_world_%28en%29.png/1280px-Map_of_the_Legal_systems_of_the_world_%28en%29.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/92/Ma... EDIT: This may even be the reason why legal tech in the US is way ahead of europe.
- ginko 7y ago>This may even be the reason why legal tech in the US is way ahead of europe. My guess is that Civil law simply doesn't need that much specialized tech since the law is clearly defined by the law books. The need to search tons of case law is mostly a result of the antiquated Common law system.
- aklemm 7y agoI’ve asked before, but never got a good idea. How should a lay person best understand law without becoming a lawyer? What do we read? Where is a good course?
- z3t4 7y agoShould be available in book form. Lawyers basically knows it as a christian knows the bible.
- seereadhack 7y agoThe Legal Analyst by Ward Farnsworth is an enjoyable introduction. https://www.amazon.com/Legal-Analyst-Toolkit-Thinking-about/dp/0226238350 https://www.amazon.com/Legal-Analyst-Toolkit-Thinking-about/... The Law Student's Toolkit class on Coursera from Yale's Ian Ayers covers some similar ground. https://www.coursera.org/learn/law-student/ https://www.coursera.org/learn/law-student/
- skizm 7y agoSerious question: is there any publicly available place I can go and simply read all the laws? Obviously knowing the letter of the law won't let me know how to apply it in all situations, but I literally have no idea how to discover what laws I'm supposed to follow, besides asking a lawyer.
- quanticle 7y agoThe Cornell Law College has the entire US Code published on its website: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text
- skizm 7y agoNeat, thanks! Curious though, where does Cornell get the source material / wording from? When something changes, how are they informed? Does the government keep a master copy somewhere?
- bjourne 7y agoThey subscribe to the US government's gazette: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Register https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Register Each US state also has a corresponding gazette.
- skizm 7y agoCool, thanks!
- ajdlinux 7y agoYou can see the government's version of the US Code at https://uscode.house.gov/ https://uscode.house.gov/. The Cornell version is more browsable. The Office of the Law Revision Counsel is responsible for taking each individual Act of Congress and updating the USC appropriately.
- astonex 7y agoIn the UK we have http://www.legislation.gov.uk http://www.legislation.gov.uk
- rb808 7y agoI'm genuinely surprised you can take a Chinese state-owned corporation to court. Does China really have environmental laws which regular people can sue over?
- threwawasy1228 7y agoSo, you would be surprised, Chinese law itself is actually extremely comprehensive and large. I would argue that Chinese law is nearly identical in scope to most Western law. There are laws on the books enshrining freedoms, and many which allow the people to hold the state accountable. All this with the humongous caveat that courts and judges will often not enforce laws as they are written, so just because China might have stringent environmental protections on its books, getting a judge who will actually allow such cases is difficult. The law is structured in such a way that the judges and courts have a great deal of freedom and discretion about which laws to enforce when, and can decide not to enforce laws at specific times. This is seen as a strength of the system, in that it prevents a lot of obtuse bickering over minor details of legal interpretation. The judge can do maneuvers like saying "The spirit and intent of the law was this, doesn't matter what it actually says" and this is legal. So yes the Chinese state probably does have protections for this sort of thing, but they probably never enforce any of them because of rampant abuse.
- ourlordcaffeine 7y ago>and many which allow the people to hold the state accountable The thing is, if you try to use your right to petition Beijing, for example, you will be harassed and may be arrested. I followed the story on weibo of a parent who petitioned Beijing for better discipline in schools after bullies took out her son's eye. She was followed by agents, prevented from taking her son to hospital appointments in the city and forced to sign a "confession" that she was a dissident. So yes, you have the right, but if you use it, you will be targeted. So stop spreading this "China is not so bad, it has the same freedoms as in the west!" bs.
- yorwba 7y agoRight after the part you quoted: > All this with the humongous caveat that courts and judges will often not enforce laws as they are written Please don't use selective quotations to misrepresent the viewpoints of other commenters.
- yorwba 7y agoReading the linked report by the Center for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims [1], it's clear that the problem was not with the law being so complex it took 16 years to understand, but that the agencies tasked with enforcing the law were trying very hard to shirk their duty and stalling him at every opportunity. The People's Daily article [2] recounts a nice anecdote about getting rebuffed when requesting land use maps from the responsible agency, which he countered by quoting the law granting him access from memory, which apparently scared the agency employee enough to hand him the maps. [1] http://www.clapv.org/english_lvshi/ZhiChiAnJian_Content.asp?id=61&title=Support%20cases&titlecontent=PD_zhichianjian&lei1=20 http://www.clapv.org/english_lvshi/ZhiChiAnJian_Content.asp?... [2] http://jx.people.com.cn/n2/2017/0203/c355185-29659118.html http://jx.people.com.cn/n2/2017/0203/c355185-29659118.html
- icsllaf 7y agoHonestly, a good amount of law and politics is knowing what you can or cannot do. It's not that law is complex it's that dealing with people who know law, or people that know that you don't know about law is complex. You can see it when people with the basic understanding of police interactions can avoid so much illegal stuff happening if they just know when to say no.
- wpdev_63 7y agoNot a lawyer, in any country, but I assume chinese law is whatever the government feel likes at that time. Can't imagine their law is like anything in the west.
- aaron695 7y agoThis is fake news.... Not hard to see, you can even read the original article in google translate, which seems to be their only source and they still messed it up. The case was 16 years start to finish, not him studying law. He used a lawyer..... "Wang Enlin began work to protect his rights in 2006 and received assistance from the Center for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims (CLAPV) in 2007" [1] Sure you just want a meme to make you happy, but Reddit did this story years ago. And they have new memes that are untrue and fun there now. The more real story here is still kinda cool [2]. But this isn't close to the truth. [1] https://ipen.org/sites/default/files/documents/Case%20Study%20Report%20Qihua%202015r.pdf https://ipen.org/sites/default/files/documents/Case%20Study%... [2] http://www.clapv.org/english_lvshi/ZhiChiAnJian_Content.asp?id=61&title=Support%20cases&titlecontent=PD_zhichianjian&lei1=20 http://www.clapv.org/english_lvshi/ZhiChiAnJian_Content.asp?...
- vincvinc 7y agoWhy was this comment was marked dead? I am "vouch"ing it for now because I have read Wang Enlin's story a long time ago, and though a cool story, I have doubts about this version of the story by the Independent to be a good representation.
- yorwba 7y agoThe account was banned in 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15691778 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15691778 If a comment is marked as [dead] but not [flagged] it was killed automatically, usually for reasons related to the account, not the specific comment in question.