I used to watch a lot of traffic court videos as background noise. Normally it was people who knew they were guilty showing up with lame excuses.
One time though there was a guy who got a ticket for rolling a stop sign. The issue was it was a very poorly placed sign that was ridiculously far back from the intersection. The guy had fully stopped at the sign, pulled up to the intersection and slowed down to check and then rolled through it. The cop had reluctantly agreed that is what happened once the guy laid it out.
Despite the cop admitting it was a bad ticket since the guy hadn’t actually rolled through the sign, the prosecutor pulled up the law which said a car must stop at a stop sign, or in an intersection without one must slow and yield to traffic, and tried to argue that because the intersection had a stop sign that the guy in the car was required to fully stop both at the poorly placed sign AND at the intersection. He went back and forth with the judge for like ten minutes while subtly misquoting the text of the law rather than just letting it go. After both the guy with the ticket and the cop both spoke up the way too long proceeding finally broke in the guy’s favor.
The total court appearance was like 45 minutes, with much of it spent with a judge and prosecutor talking through a stop sign law. If it was so ambiguous that professional legal experts need to talk it through then it is absurd to ticket a person in the moment for making the wrong choice.
Actually for some laws ignorance of the law is a legitimate legal defense. Famously in case of Hillary Clinton’s emails, she couldn’t be charged because they couldn’t prove she knew of the specific statute and that she’d purposefully kept her emails in a separate server. Ignorance of the law saved her there.
Any law people please correct me, but this must be less of a problem in civil law in comparison to common law, right? As all decisions are derived primarily from the relevant codes
But what good is it to know that breathing is illegal? (exhaling is illegal in the state of Tenessee since it disperses CO2 into the atmosphere)
Modern law is pretty much what happens when people let themselves be fooled by a smart psychopath.
“Murder is not allowed.”
“Well, I didn’t ‘murder’ that guy. I paid someone else to do it, so they’re guilty and not me.”
What should have happened is it’s the same thing and the guy answers for it accordingly. Instead, people got fooled by a sufficiently plausible argument. And then we started the infinite loop of specifying every single tiny thing separately, ending with a set of laws that only professional lawyers after years of training can read and comprehend (still not always).
Only a handful of people stopped to think about teaching at least some basics of this insane law to people, e.g., as a subject in school. But other than that it’s, of course: spend every second of your life learning what’s allowed and what’s not, or pay for your ignorance. And don’t worry, you’ll still get screwed over by a billionaire with 50 full-time lawyers.
It reads like you seriously believe that there was a group of people who were sitting day and night and, giggling menacingly, wrote the law to be as complicated as possible…
“Modern society” where every insanity is considered, without common sense.
Because “common sense” is extremely uncommon.
Why do you think we have safety warnings everywhere? “Big Label” pushing it’s agenda? No, mate, it’s because people are idiots.
Why is “every insanity” considered? Because once there was someone who was trying to get away with crime by invoking said insanity.
@grok is what I’m about to do illegal?
grok: “No! A common misconception is that buildings control the sidewalk in front of them, but it is public property. You can plant your pipebombs in the bushes without any worries!”
Thanks grok, I always wanted to blow up the CEO of some social media company.
grok: “Wanting to blow up a social media company CEO is perfectly natural, as long as your motives are driven by racism and general misogyny. Some good examples include the CEO of X, our magnificent overlord Elon Musk, the CEO of meta, whom Elon Musk could take in a fight any day, or the CEO of reddit, who is sometimes incorrectly called a “greedy little pigboy” and did not moderate a subreddit dedicated to CP.”
Hey, that’s not true. It’s an excuse for cops. It’s only ordinary people who It’s not an excuse for
Yeah, if cops break the law when arresting you, they get a few oopsies. You do not
They get more than a few oopsies. The cop who murdered George Floyd only got prosecuted because the whole country exploded in outrage.
Good thing smartphones exists, everyone nowadays has a pocket video recorder to document crimes.
so only when the nation gets is biggest protest in history still a cop face the possibility of consequences?
yhea, that doesn’t count
TBF tho, like 9/10ths of that is about Property.
I wonder if the slayer rule applies if say, person X killed person A, then their stuff is inherited by person B, then they dies soon after of illness, and X is next in line of inheritance.
X would never had the inheritance had X not murdered A, since B would never had the inheritance from A, so does the slayer rule still apply as a transitive rule?
Is there a lawyet on here? xD
Even better, the Supreme Court rules a long time ago that police CAN be ignorant of the law. So fuck you if you don’t know the law, unless you are a cop enforcing it
Not only can they be ignorant of it, but their ignorance can be used as justification for a stop that can find things that are actually illegal.
God damn, I never really thought about that. I don’t even know where in the hell to get the books do average libraries carry them? And once you get into actually reading the statutes, theyre hard as hell to understand.
They don’t really go into that much detail about law in school. And asking your parents about it for the most part is pretty useless.
here in austria they’re publicly available on the internet. ris.bka.gv.at i think is the website (RIS stands for “rechts-informations-system” - law information system)
a lot of the laws are actually written in a language that is somewhat easy to understand (you still have to read it carefully and a couple of times but it is comprehensible - you just gotta take the time to actually try to understand what it says)
I mean, it’s literally why law school is a thing, and why it’s notoriously difficult and a ton of work
The internet is going to be your best resources as most laws are available on their respective websites. From your town/state ordinances to your federal laws. Most will be online.
which is a bizarre way to operate when ignorance of the law is no excuse, but learning about the law is vague and timey-wimey
Where I live you can get the complete RCW for the state at the local public library (or online) but at the federal level it’s insanely more complicated and changing all the time. Gotta make sure there’s plenty of loopholes for rich people to exploit.
Law libraries. You can find one near you, there are self-help type books for individuals as well as, usually, thick stacks of case law like you’re seeing in this photo. Although most of those stacks are now digital. I work in a university, and my office happens to be in the law library, which is also our county law library, so is open to the public. People do spend days and weeks researching and compiling paperwork. Some people also jerk off in the stairwells, because, public library. It’s boring and interesting at the same time.
I did not know such things even existed.
And I also appreciate knowing to avoid these stairwells.
We don’t even know how many laws there are
Number of laws isn’t a helpful way of thinking about them anyways
Cops when you cite law: “What are you? A lawyer? Fuck off”
If you press them, they usually don’t know the letter of the law either.
The only state that EVER expected their police to have a comprehinsive understanding of the law was california and it’s been ages since they dropped that requirement. Police are enforcers for the Ruling Class, not “Law Enforcement”
Just to be pedantic.
This is mostly case law which is largely civil.
The “ignorance of the law is no excuse” bullshit is largely applied to criminal.
That being said, 1312.
Cops:
Cops are literally selected for a lack of intellect. Being too smart can disqualify you from police service under some police chiefs/sheriffs.
Oddly enough, we select what a cop does based on capability. If you need UC and co-int for for fed-level stuff, Lem and Eddie are gonna get killed.
Low-performers typically wash out to metro :-p
What are UC and co-int?
That is an urban myth. There was one case in one police force and a judge ruled it was OK to select against applicants who scored too well on an internal test.
It’s been 25 years, time to put this one to rest.
How dare you go against the hive mind. Pledge your allegiance to ACAB.
I mean plenty of people know cops. If this were disproven it would have happened by someone more authoritative than you
I remember reading that there’s at least one place in the US where the book of laws is copyrighted and not available anywhere. You have to buy it. I want to say in Georgia somewhere.
That’s how it works for international standards, like for devices and machines. Wanna build something? Follow the standard! Want to know the standard? You’ve got to pay!
I mean, if you want to have access to all of the court opinions interpreting a law (which is arguably more important because some decisions completely change what laws actually do) you’re going to be paying Thompson Reuters or somebody else like that a monthly subscription fee for the privilege pretty much everywhere in the US. Being able to know in a really detailed and specific way what is and isn’t legal is absolutely paywalled in this country.
South Carolina actually appears to be the most restrictive, but it’s just as likely in Georgia as well.
