I have been thinking about this a lot lately- it used to be said the “Ignorance of the law is no excuse” but in this day and age of hundreds of thousands of laws and law boioks how can it NOT be an excuse?
How can you break the law if you don’t know it is a law?
I sure as heck would not have expected it to be against the law for a legal age DRIVER to transport someone who is of legal drinking age who purchases alcohol.. wth???
>>I sure as heck would not have expected it to be against the law for a legal age DRIVER to transport someone who is of legal drinking age who purchases alcohol.. wth???<<
In this case, I totally agree. Makes me wonder if there’s a similar law there regarding cigarettes.
“There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted and you create a nation of law-breakers.”
Ayn Rand, “Atlas Shrugged”
Even judges have forgotten the meaning of that phrase. It was not intended to imply that everyone needs to be a lawyer, but rather that if someone was doing something immoral, but didn't know that there was a law against the act, that ignorance of the law was no excuse since they shouldn't have been doing it anyways.