This will be very short post readers, I ask you to comment back and share your ideas on the following questions:
Does the old adage that ignorance of the law is no excuse still carry weight in a world where the people who make and vote on the laws don't even read them?
In a world where an average law is close to a thousand pages or more and requires extensive cross references from one law to another, can anyone truly know the law?
1 comment:
I actually talked about this issue a bit with some of my coworkers, one of whom was a staffer on the Hill. It surprises me that the lawmaking system is run so much by the lobbyists, who make the laws because they care, instead of by the senators, who are elected to make the laws because they pretend to care.
As to your question, I don't know for sure. Saying that ignorance of the law is no excuse is usually used to remove a begging criminal's last explanation. But does universal ignorance extinguish the legitimacy of that removal? I doubt it. The logic still remains, because the statement does not depend on how many know the law compared to how many people don't. Instead it recognizes what is perhaps a natural law principle that humans are responsible to do what is right, whether they know it or not. But the fact that fewer and fewer people know what the law is, if that is true, certainly makes it harder to effectively enforce that principle.
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