2 ms·

> people fail to realize that rule of law is the single greatest defense against tyranny that we have. This purist view ignores the fact that not all laws are

> people fail to realize that rule of law is the single greatest defense against tyranny that we have. This purist view ignores the fact that not all laws are good. Many laws are in fact bad, and it’s important for them to be challenged. As an example, many here would agree that the DMCA is a bad law. It’s a law that is generally only enforceable by wealthy players. There are many bad laws on the books. Those laws do not get equally applied to everyone in society. The fact that we have bad laws, implies that applying them will lead to bad outcomes. This is partly why having an unbiased appellate court to review the laws and throw out the bad ones is so important. Sadly much of the appellate court has also become corrupted, but at least the system is there to ideally correct bad laws and allow for blind application of justice.

ralusek 5y ago
Blind application of justice is rule of law. And nobody is saying there aren't bad laws; there are plenty. We just have a system in place which dictates where the law is created, where the law is modified, and where the law is carried out. Our legislative branch is writing the code, theoretically downstream from our democracy, theoretically constrained by the meta layer that is the constitution. I don't want my code to be compiled only for the execution layer to suddenly decide that the code I wrote isn't what I meant. What if the execution layer is a racist? What if they stand to benefit financially from a particular ruling, as the OP says? What we should want is the judiciary acting like a compiled executable. If we're going to argue that a law is fair or not, let's do it with our democracy through some pull requests, and not give our executable the leeway to decide if they personally like the code they're meant to carry out.

2 ms·

> people fail to realize that rule of law is the single greatest defense against tyranny that we have. This purist view ignores the fact that not all laws are

by bluejekyll 5y ago

ralusek 5y ago
Blind application of justice is rule of law. And nobody is saying there aren't bad laws; there are plenty. We just have a system in place which dictates where the law is created, where the law is modified, and where the law is carried out. Our legislative branch is writing the code, theoretically downstream from our democracy, theoretically constrained by the meta layer that is the constitution. I don't want my code to be compiled only for the execution layer to suddenly decide that the code I wrote isn't what I meant. What if the execution layer is a racist? What if they stand to benefit financially from a particular ruling, as the OP says? What we should want is the judiciary acting like a compiled executable. If we're going to argue that a law is fair or not, let's do it with our democracy through some pull requests, and not give our executable the leeway to decide if they personally like the code they're meant to carry out.