Comment by andrewflnr
13 hours ago
Strange and destructive. I believe comprehensible law is a human right that is critically underacknowledged. Like, up there with the right to speech and a fair trial.
If you cannot understand the law as it applies to you, you cannot possibly be free under that law, because your actions will always be constrained by your uncertainty.
Seems to be less of an issue in practice, as the level of detail is pretty clear unless you're operating at the "bleeding edge" of legal understanding, in which case I imagine you can afford to hire someone to figure out the details to you.
Perfect understanding of every law and its consequence is not possible anyway, because laws are meant to be contextual and interpreted by humans, to allow for exceptions in unusual cases (contrast that with the monumentally stupid idea of "law as code", which, if implemented, would grind us all under the gears).
In vast majority of cases, people don't need more certainty than they have or can trivially get, because variance of outcome is low. E.g. you don't need to know the exact amount of dollars where shoplifting turns from misdemeanor into a felony - it's usually enough to know that you shouldn't do it, and that stealing some bread once to feed your kids will probably not land you in jail for long, but stealing a TV just might. And by "low variance" in outcomes I mean, there's obvious proportionality and continuity; it's not the case that if you steal bread brand A, you get a fine, but if you steal bread brand B, you go straight to supermax, right away.
This is not to deny the ideal, but rather to point out that practical reality is much more mundane than picking apart unique court cases makes one think.
One of the awesome things about the American Constitution is that it's not really written in complicated language. Of course this hasn't made things straightforward or easy.
A corollary to your second paragraph is that you can concentrate power if you keep the masses from understanding it fully or able to practice it competently. This is why passing the bar exam is so difficult. What if most criminals were as adept at fighting their charges as they are at physically fighting? (Meaning: won a healthy percentage of the time). The system is designed to crush people and concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few.
maybe we’re inching towards rule by law vs rule of law by making things so abstruse that you need a multiyear education to understand what is allowed, when and where.
As the complexity of the world increases this may naturally happen