Unsent text accepted as dead man's will by Australian court

I... believe so? Speaking from experience with older models: You can hold a combination of the keys to go into https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/DFU_Mode, and if you plug the device to your computer, you can reflash the OS. The phone would have multiple partitions, so it would only flash the OS partition with the new version of the OS, and leave the (encrypted) data partition alone.

It's funny how quickly you turn from a strict Constitutionalist to an activist judge based on your political views.

For instance, most left-leaning people probably think that in the civilian forfeiture rule, the judges should take a strict constructional interpretation of the constitution and forbid it.

However, when it comes to striking down immigration bans based on an economic argument[1], all of a sudden you want an activist judge.

I'm not saying I care either way, but I care about consistency. I think we are based on a common law system, and once an economic argument is successfully made it can be make at any time. If we're ok with that, we should be ok with civil forfeiture.

[1] The state says the ban would harm its tourism industry and the ability to recruit foreign students and workers.

The point being made is that the choice isn't between 'strict constitutionalism' and loosey-goosey-legalism, it is between loosey-goosey-legalism and feudal warlordism. I realize a disturbing number of techies are actually attracted to that (even if they think it will turn out differently), but I think most of the US populace thankfully isn't.

The theory is that there's a social analogue of Gödel's theorem, the humans are incapable of defining a formal set of rules for governing themselves that provides non-absurd outcomes in all cases. I believe this, but of course we don't have solvers for human reasoning (otherwise we could test the theory).

So sure, I absolutely agree with you that civil forfeiture is just a new name for highway robbery by the King's men. But for literalist constitutionalism to be viable, it has to handle hard cases as well as simple ones in zero-and negative-sum games, and the US Constitution (any document) leaves huge areas of potential conflict undefined. So your choice reduces to either it won't work with real humans, or you have to interpret it. To interpret it means designating someone (or some people) as official interpreters. And at some point, you find yourself back where we started, arguing about the interpretation of justices who are right because they are final.

Law is generally clearly defined for common situations. But you can't anticipate all possible contingencies so courts also have to make findings of fact, frequently on limited or incomplete information.

I'm trying to be descriptive not prescriptive. It's not really about whether or not I'm happy with any given result.

Let's say that suddenly there's a law that makes it illegal for the police to take anything out of a car AND we also eliminate all human judges. This completely stops civil forfeiture. Everyone is happy.

One day someone steals a priceless wax sculpture that represents invaluable cultural history for an area. This person throws the sculpture into a car and then drives off. After a short car chase the police disable the getaway car. The day is saved! Wait not yet. It happens to be a very hot day.

There's two things that can happen. The first is that the police can leave the wax sculpture in the car and because it's so hot it melts. The locals get mad and riot because the police willfully let their cultural history turn into a puddle. The second is that a police officer takes the wax sculpture out of the car, but then that officer is arrested for violating the law mentioned above. Then the locals get mad and riot because the government arrested the hero who saved their cultural history.

A lot of governance is a balancing act to prevent anarchy from taking over. If a human is in charge someplace then they can overrule a law that either doesn't make sense or is otherwise problematic. This can lead to tyranny, but hopefully the government itself is setup to prevent this as much as possible.

Multiple notarized copies, just to ensure it hasn't been altered. If you do alter it, again make sure there are multiple copies and that it contains verbiage that it supersedes the previous document

Not a lawyer, not legal advice, you know the drill. However, the above is from my lawyer and is the policy I follow. He witnesses it AND it is notarized by a third party.

If you follow the OP, he is talking about the concept of forging Wills (in fact he is making a bad joke about doing this to his own Grandpa) not the specific facts of this case.

That said, you may be very surprised at what fraudsters do in practice. Accessing bank accounts of elderly parents with or without their knowledge, accessing their electronic devices, or even creating actual forged Wills (complete with signature and notarized) is not exactly unheard of in law. Even murders made to look like suicide specifically to claim inheritance isn't just the stuff of fantasy and movies, same goes for murders made to look like accidents to claim life insurance. In fact very often it is actually a parent who murders a child for insurance money.

Here is a link that includes 21 such cases: https://www.jrcinsurancegroup.com/murder-for-life-insurance-...