ON one hand, lawyers say, “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”
ON the other hand, lawyers say, “If you run into the law, you’ll need a lawyer because the law is too complicated for the layman to understand.”
Funny thing, too, since the US Constitution, the originating document for all law, is written in English, yet, lawyers like to practice law using Latin, as though they are trying to hide their thoughts from the layman.
Ignorance *IS* an excuse. Works every time. With the caveat that you are a leftist.
Ignorance *IS NEVER* an excuse, otherwise.
The Lord gave us 10 perfectly good ones.
What we need is more laws to go after the regulators, government attorneys and bureaucrats. In some cases you can get them for procedural errors or in a perjury trap. If anyone is wronged by over-zealous prosecution, the victim should file a complaint to their legal board or other venue for bureaucrats (in WI it’s legislative audit bureau). That way if cases go to court, their integrity can be impugned in subsequent and other legal proceedings and it forces them on the defensive.
Bureaucrats like to be nameless and faceless so -called “public servants”. In reality, they have more privacy than those in the so-called “private sector” upon whom they prey.
BTW, Oliver Wendell Holmes is purported to have crafted the phrase “ignorance of the law is not excuse”. He was also an ardent eugenicist.
The lawmakers want it that way. This way innocent people are ensnared in the net of an out-of-control law, and the prosecutors can crow about all their indictments and how they’re putting away criminals.
It’s about getting the numbers up. So what if the law was deliberately made unworkable SO AS to trap people?
They have discretion, which means that they can set free those who are politically connected or who have paid big bucks to a well-placed politician, and ream the a$$es of the ordinary people who go to work for a living.
OK, we need one NEW law: All existing laws must be rewritten to a format of three pages or less, in language and usage understandable by any English speaking person with the equivalent of a sixth grade education.
“Man … must necessarily be subject to the laws of his Creator.. This will of his Maker is called the law of nature…. This law of nature…is of course superior to any other…. No human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this: and such of them as are valid derive all their force…from this original.” – Sir William Blackstone (Eminent English Jurist)
The Founders DID NOT establish the Constitution for the purpose of granting rights. Rather, they established this government of laws (not a government of men) in order to secure each person’s Creator endowed rights to life, liberty, and property.
Only in America, did a nation’s founders recognize that rights, though endowed by the Creator as unalienable prerogatives, would not be sustained in society unless they were protected under a code of law which was itself in harmony with a higher law. They called it “natural law,” or “Nature’s law.” Such law is the ultimate source and established limit for all of man’s laws and is intended to protect each of these natural rights for all of mankind. The Declaration of Independence of 1776 established the premise that in America a people might assume the station “to which the laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them..”
Herein lay the security for men’s individual rights – an immutable code of law, sanctioned by the Creator of man’s rights, and designed to promote, preserve, and protect him and his fellows in the enjoyment of their rights. They believed that such natural law, revealed to man through his reason, was capable of being understood by both the "ploughman and the professor." Sir William Blackstone, whose writings trained American’s lawyers for its first century, capsulized such reasoning:
“For as God, when he created matter, and endued it with a principle of mobility, established certain rules for the…direction of that motion; so, when he created man, and endued him with freewill to conduct himself in all parts of life, he laid down certain immutable laws of human nature, whereby that freewill is in some degree regulated and restrained, and gave him also the faculty of reason to discover the purport of those laws.”
What are those natural laws? Blackstone continued:
“Such among others are these principles: that we should live honestly, should hurt nobody, and should render to every one his due..”
The Founders saw these as moral duties between individuals. Thomas Jefferson wrote:
“Man has been subjected by his Creator to the moral law, of which his feelings, or conscience as it is sometimes called, are the evidence with which his Creator has furnished him …. The moral duties which exist between individual and individual in a state of nature, accompany them into a state of society . their Maker not having released them from those duties on their forming themselves into a nation.”
Americas leaders of 1787 had studied Cicero, Polybius, Coke, Locke, Montesquieu, and Blackstone, among others, as well as the history of the rise and fall of governments, and they recognized these underlying principles of law as those of the Decalogue, the Golden Rule, and the deepest thought of the ages.
An example of the harmony of natural law and natural rights is Blackstone’s “that we should live honestly” – otherwise known as “thou shalt not steal” – whose corresponding natural right is that of individual freedom to acquire and own, through honest initiative, private property. In the Founders’ view, this law and this right were inalterable and of a higher order than any written law of man.
Thus, the Constitution confirmed the law and secured the right and bound both individuals and their representatives in government to a moral code which did not permit either to take the earnings of another without his consent. Under this code, individuals could not band together and do, through government’s coercive power, that which was not lawful between individuals.
America’s Constitution is the culmination of the best reasoning of men of all time and is based on the most profound and beneficial values mankind has been able to fathom. It is, as William E. Gladstone observed, “The Most Wonderful Work Ever Struck Off At A Given Time By The Brain And Purpose Of Man.“
We should dedicate ourselves to rediscovering and preserving an understanding of our Constitution’s basis in natural law for the protection of natural rights – principles which have provided American citizens with more protection for individual rights, while guaranteeing more freedom, than any people on earth.
“The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.” -John Locke
"Although the majority opinion did not explicitly mention innocent password sharing, the dissent noted that the lack of any limiting principle meant that the majority’s reasoning could easily be used to criminalize a host of innocent conduct."
FR: Never Accept the Premise of Your Opponent’s Argument
The Court’s explanation for not hearing the referenced case is lame imo.
More specifically, when any law, regulation or official action of the constitutionally limited power federal government is questioned, the fed’s constitutional authority to make a given law or regulation also needs to be clarified imo.
"From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added].” —United States v. Butler, 1936.
That being said, the states have never expressly constitutionally delegated to the corrupt feds the specific power to make "The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986” imo, that law another example of the already unconstitutionally big federal government unconstitutionally expanding its powers imo.
In fact, I strongly suggest that the states amend the Constitution to require that all three branches of the federal government reference the constitutional clauses that justify a law, bill or action when officially and publicly commenting about a law, bill or action.
The CBO should also be constitutionally required to publicly report appropriations bills that cannot be justified under Congress’s constitutional Article I, Section 8-limited powers.
"Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States."—Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
Next, patriots are reminded that the 2016 elections are arguably not over yet, patriots needing to finish the job that they started when they elected Pres. Trump.
More specifically, patriots need to make sure that there are plenty of state sovereignty-respecting, Trump-supporting patriot candidates on the primary ballots for the 2018 elections, and then pink-slip Trump-hating career lawmakers by sending patriot candidate lawmakers to DC on election day.
When the law is too complicated to be understood, everyone is a criminal.
Even the lawyers don’t even know what all the laws are.