Why should there be a law against leaving things laying around? The guy should have watched where he was going. Having the law does not make society safer, but having a means of suing to get money back in a civil court does. Why should there be criminal law when civil law works better? We don't need law schools and lawyers to have common sense applied in a civil case with a jury of peers and a reasonably intelligent judge.
I know that my ideas are to be considered whacky, but the system of law that we have is worse than whacky, it is corrupt and easily corruptible.
"You can only interpret the law if you don't know what it is" is a peculiar idea.
Why should there be a law against leaving things laying around?
How about buried land mines? Or razor blades in a daycare? Or a handful of nails on the road?
The guy should have watched where he was going.
You have come up with an exception to the general rule that "if you hurt somebody, you pay them back". Excellent. That's common law, and it's what judges do.
We don't need law schools and lawyers to have common sense applied in a civil case with a jury of peers and a reasonably intelligent judge.
Because sometimes people disagree on what common sense dictates. In that case, society defers to "what did we do last time?", and that's where law comes from.
In addition, some disputes are too complicated to have common sense applied. Homespun wisdom doesn't help much if the dispute is, say, between two steel companies over provisions in a asset sale and liability assumption agreement.
On Vashon Island (Washington State) we used to have our own courthouse and our own judge, whom we elected. She was a good and fair judge, but had never been an attorney. We also had our own police force. They were generally fair as well, seeing as they shopped in the same stores that we shopped in, their kids attended the same schools as us, they went to the same churches, etc.
The county did away with our police force, and started shipping in officers from Burien (ours weren't writing enough tickets). The Burien police kept setting up radar traps in a place where the speed limit was actually rather obscure, due to the placing of the signs. The judge kept throwing out the tickets, telling the officers that if they wanted to write tickets for speeding in that one 200 foot stretch of road, they would need to move the signs.
Then the county decided that we didn't need a judge anymore, but couldn't fire her, so they closed our courthouse. Now, if anybody living on the island gets a ticket, they need to take the ferry and go to Burien to fight it. (I no longer live on the island).
And that was the last time that Vashon Island had it's own judge, and the last time that we had a judge that was not an attorney.