Comment by Turing_Machine
2 years ago
"Reasonable" does a lot of work throughout the entire legal system.
If there's one constant that can be relied upon, it's that "things that are reasonable to a lawyer" and "things that are reasonable to a normal human being" are essentially disjoint sets.
> “Reasonable” does a lot of work throughout the entire legal system.
Yes, but here it’s not being invoked in the sense of “would a reasonable person believe based on this evidence that the facts which would violate the actual law exist” but “would a ‘reasonable’ person believe the law is what the law, indisputably, actually is”.
It’s being invoked to question the reality of the law itself, based on its subjective undesirability to the speaker.
>"Reasonable" does a lot of work throughout the entire legal system.
Yet it never becomes anywhere near the significant fulcrum you made it out to be here, filtering between the laws you think are good and the laws you think are bad. Further, you seem to mistake attorneys with legislators. I'd be surprised if a reasonable person thinks it is okay to profit off the likeness of others without their permission. But I guess you don't think that's reasonable. What a valuable conversation we're having.
No, it has nothing to do with "legislators". The "reasonable man" standard is all over case law, and there are about a bazillion cases where attorneys have argued that their client's behavior was "reasonable", even when it was manifestly not so by the standards of an actual reasonable man.
You can, as they say, look it up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person
>No, it has nothing to do with "legislators".
You seem incredibly confused. Legislators pass legislation, not lawyers. So it was never a question as to what lawyers thought reasonable laws are. State representatives determined that it was a good idea to have right of publicity laws and that is why they exist in many large states in the US.
> The "reasonable man" standard is all over case law
Yes, as I already pointed out to you, and another poster did as well, this "reasonable man" standard has nothing to do with your prior use of the word reasonable as an attempt to filter out which laws are the ones you think are okay to enforce.
>You can, as they say, look it up.
You should take your own advice!
2 replies →
> "things that are reasonable to a lawyer" and "things that are reasonable to a normal human being" are essentially disjoint sets.
In litigation, any question whether X was "reasonable" is typically determined by a jury, not a judge [0].
[0] That is, unless the trial judge decides that there's no genuine issue of fact and that reasonable people [1] could reach only one possible conclusion; when that's the case, the judge will rule on the matter "as a matter of law." But that's a dicey proposition for a trial judge, because an appeals court would reverse and remand if the appellate judges decided that reasonable people could indeed reach different conclusions [1].
[1] Yeah, I know it's turtles all the way down, or maybe it's circular, or recursive.