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Comment by an_ko | Hacker News Reader

I think it's really fucked up that people have to study law. I'm expected to live by a complex set of rules that only a few understand well enough to reliably navigate, where any transgression might ruin the rest of my life?

Almost nobody I know has even read any law. Whenever I have, it has been a frustrating exercise in deciphering jargon and ridiculously long sentences. It leaves me a modest degree of terrified to do anything, because everything is probably illegal by some interpretation of some corner of some strange grammar used in some paragraph or other somewhere.

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It's not like law was ever going to fit onto a note card, unless the law was "What King George says, goes". Even if you assume no interference from organizations manipulating the law, life is complex and sometimes morally ambiguous. Even simple board games have rule books of many pages- or, those that don't, frequently leave the players wondering about some ambiguous circumstance.

Remember, too, that our legal system was designed to temper the "everything is probably illegal by some interpretation..." nature. That's why you have a right to confront your accuser, a right to a jury of your peers, the "reasonable man" standard, so on and so forth.

If approached from outside it should be rather straightforward to craft effective law. Unfortunately, laws are approached from inside.

It would probably be about as easy as a lawyer trying to write a new OS, because from the outside it looks like it should be straightforward.

This is a good point, law is the operating system for society. When you think about any given issue, you run into many sub-issues.

However, keep in mind this is Chinese law which at this point is only enforced selectively to back the goals of its dictator and the CCP. If dictator Xi Jumping did not want this feel good story to run, it would not have ran. If this farmer had any way even hinted it crossing the communist party of China, he probably would have been murdered and buried in his own field.

> I think it's really fucked up that people have to study law. I'm expected to live by a complex set of rules that only a few understand well enough to reliably navigate, where any transgression might ruin the rest of my life?

Have you heard about the UpCodes suit?[1] No pressure on UpCodes or anything, but if they don't win forget trying to understand it, you might not even be able to read the law without paying a fee.

I take your point, it's scary that we're subject to so many rules and regulations that most of us are completely unaware of (and I say that as someone who has studied law) but imagine how much worse that will be if we aren't even able to freely read the rules in the first place?

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/09/can-the-law-be-copyrighted...

As someone building his own house right now, I exactly understand the complexities here. It's outrageous. Many of the laws are counterproductive and the use of certain products is lobbied for by the companies making them.

Drywall, insulation, plumbing, electrical all these products work their way into the laws encoded in building codes. Many of the companies have members on the committees of these "non-profit" organizations.

It's terrible. It's part of the reason houses cost so much.

Everyone wants their piece of the pie. If you want to house yourself, first you must feed everyone else.

A big flaw of modern society is the most experienced experts we rely on for industry regulations inevitably have a bias towards their industry.

Look in any industry and their regulating bodies and often it's a revolving door of key executives giving each other a slap on the wrist now and then and not effectively regulating or punishing clear wrongdoing.

At the same time, we've seen the result of deregulation in New Zealand, which in part resulted in the Leaky Homes Crisis [1]. Developers tend to put profit first, if the house falls apart 10 years later it doesn't matter to the developer or the builder, they already made their money.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_homes_crisis

Holy shit, this is absolutely outrageous.

I find laws to generally be very readable, the issue is case law is monkey patching the laws as written making all specific interpretations up for debate. At a minimum studying all the related Supreme Court cases is effectively required. Luckily there are only so many of those: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_United_States_Supre...

After that you’re still going to need to talk to a lawyer, but you should be able to keep up with what’s being said.

Note that China does not use Common law. Civil law is much more rule based; similarities in cases can not be used to explain each other. Having case XYZ the rule for XY may be disabled by a rule for Z (being defined in a completely different law book).

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/92/Ma...

EDIT: This may even be the reason why legal tech in the US is way ahead of europe.

>This may even be the reason why legal tech in the US is way ahead of europe.

My guess is that Civil law simply doesn't need that much specialized tech since the law is clearly defined by the law books. The need to search tons of case law is mostly a result of the antiquated Common law system.

U.S. Supreme Court case opinions are also generally well-written, to the point that even people without a law degree can follow along, barring bits of jargon that usually aren't necessary to understand the overall meaning. For any news article summarizing a Supreme Court case, I generally recommend just reading the case itself.

Law is not about laws. The study of law isnt memorizing what is and isnt illegal. It is the difference between simply knowing the rules of baseball enough to play, and being the umpire at the world series.

ridiculously complicated law is emergent from democracy where the law is basically a negotiation and the final balance with all its nooks and crannys reflect the balance of power between all the interested parties.

We got smacked by that for a securities violation. We were CS undergrads raising money for our startup, no idea that financial regulation even existed.

Once we knew it was wrong, it was too late. Recisions aren't as simple as just returning the money and the legal overhead was greater than the total money raised.

Oh well. We know better today.

TOS of any electronic device or software. All the whereas and therfores the average Joe can't follow.

I did take a few law courses in uni (German law, mind you), and after the first you understand enough to be able to "read the law".

In US law in not sure because they put so much weight on precedent, that it's probably mostly difficult to find out what applies.

We live in a society based on and shaped by law. Laws and regulations are everywhere. As such it does seem reasonable to me that everyone should have a modicum of understanding of the law and legal matters work.

Schools should teach law, just like programming and music.

So law school? I know in my engineering degree we had courses on the regulatory environment that pertains to us, (FDA). Not sure about other disciplines but I'd expect civil, electrical, mechanical, aerospace, etc. have similar courses. Although, since you can't really make high-level decisions without a P.E. in those fields that might not be necessary since you will get that knowledge working with a P.E.

Don't kill, lie, cheat or steal. That will pretty much cover most of it. You don't need to be a lawyer to function in society.

Cheat is a great one, do you understand your contractual undertakings and consumer protection enough to protect your rights?

Do you know case law well enough to resolve disputes?

Its not just about mot going to jail, it's also about not being taken advantage of.

Or, you know, ship a lobster in the wrong kind of container.

https://www.nacdl.org/Document/OvercriminalizationVictimAbne...

Pretty much all layers of the American justice system are fucked, from the corrupt legislators, gamified prosecutors, bigoted juries and automaton judges.

A normal justice system has multiple checks and balances to keep undeserving people out of jail. In the US these have all been eroded and the result is the highest incarceration rate in the world.

Or buy a book an Amazon. UK people where prosecuted for having 'The Anarchist Cookbook'

https://theintercept.com/2017/10/28/josh-walker-anarchist-co...

And don't violate the Terms of Service.

Some of which may be illegal, depending on where you live. and may be changed with or without notice.

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