4 ms·

I'm not sure if that's a helpful way of looking at things. Something is legal (for a person) if it is not explicitly illegal. So if there is no law against ha

I'm not sure if that's a helpful way of looking at things. Something is legal (for a person) if it is not explicitly illegal. So if there is no law against having a bath on Wednesdays in New York, then we say you can "legally" do so. In a territory where there is no government and no laws whatsoever, it is equally legal to have a bath on Wednesdays, so you would be "legally" bathing there too. You're right, though, that in normal circumstances when we talk about things being "legal" we mean "with respect to a specific (non-null) jurisdiction". I think that's because places without jurisdictions are so rare that we don't usually think of this degenerate case. Perhaps there needs to be some special term like "vacuously legal", or "anarchically legal", to distinguish it from the more common type of legality.

Muromec 5y ago
>I'm not sure if that's a helpful way of looking at things. Something is legal (for a person) if it is not explicitly illegal. which itself is a constitutional provision
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  That's a good point, and maybe it's not well defined what the default legality is under a null (or unwritten/uncodified/implicit) constitution, but my instinct is that illegality requires someone to enforce it, whereas legality doesn't, so legality is a more natural default.
supermatt 5y ago
The word legal itself means that it is authorised by law. "Everything which is not forbidden is allowed" is an established principle of law. Without the law, there is no such provision. Therefore, without the law something can not be either legal or illegal.