Since we'll clearly never find common ground on the rest, snipped.
And you think this standard ought to still apply to a legal code that (on the federal level alone) contains so many statutes that the government no longer keeps count? (Reassuringly though, they're quite confident it contains over ten thousand individual statutes.) It's one thing to say that about a compact legal system based on ideas everyone's figured out before they hit puberty, it's a completely different matter to say that about an opaque code cobbled together with no rhyme nor reason that you couldn't read through in a lifetime.Quote:
Originally Posted by wiggin
And I'm sure your take on the matter would be quite different if you were facing two years in federal prison for picking a seashell off some beach in a tropical vacation spot, or one year for safely and securing product prototypes in a self-storage locker, or staring down a the barrels of a SWAT team's MP5s because you had the audacity to plant Orchids in your flower garden.
Ignorance of the law is no excuse, my ass. The part that goes along with that is "Fair Notice." You can't use ignorance of the law as an excuse when the authorities take reasonable measures to inform everyone of the law. Now that we no longer even pay lip service to the practice of fair notice, we can't justly punish people for not memorizing a code far too long and dense to even read through once.
