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Comment by coderintherye | Hacker News Reader

More transparency and readability for regulations sounds great. However, this part stuck out to me:

>Criminal prosecution based on regulatory offenses is most appropriate for those persons who know what is prohibited or required by the regulation and choose not to comply, thereby causing or risking substantial public harm. Criminal prosecutions based on regulatory offenses should focus on matters where a putative defendant had actual or constructive knowledge that conduct was prohibited.

This seems a step backwards. It would seem fairly easy to argue for almost any crime that one simply just didn't know it was a crime.

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> It would seem fairly easy to argue for almost any crime that one simply just didn't know it was a crime.

That only works until the government knocks on your door and points to the regulation you're violating. Then even if they don't prosecute you for doing it yesterday, you're all out of excuse if you do it tomorrow. Which gets you to stop.

“Sorry officer I didn’t know I couldn’t do that” has ever only worked for the social group with the most power. The rest get the book thrown at them. You have to enforce similar rules the same way for justice.

It's easy to argue that you didn't know, but not easy to prove it. For example, if there is any licensing or professional regulation, and all licensed professionals are expected to know X, then "I didn't know" as a licensed professional isn't going to cut it.

What if the government published a list of all the laws and expected every citizen to be familar with it?

Oh Wait.

It's literally impossible. Even the US Government does not know how many criminal laws are out there.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304319804576389...

https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/473659-america-...

https://twitter.com/CrimeADay

Why wouldn't the same thing apply to whatever licensing regulations you're expected to be aware of, in the grandparent's idea?

Losing a license is not the same as being imprisoned.

My reading of the original post is you go to jail, not you loose your license.

I'm not sure I understand your point, overall.

oh_sigh suggested that we should replace the general duty of a citizen to know the law of the land, with a presumption that if you have a professional license, you are knowlegable of all relavent laws and regulations, and thus cannot clam ignorance to avoid prosecution.

My general claim is that that is essentially already the case. If you become a citizen you have to pass a test to demonstrate familarity with the local society (if you're born here, high school is mandatory). This is no different than how professional licensing works. You could argue that citizenship tests/H.S. barely covers the law, but professional licensing doesn't either. My claim is not that the current system is neccesarily perfect or good, just that the current system where you're expected to know the law is functionally equivalent to expecting professionally licensed people (other than lawyers) to know the law, except that you just have a new class of people who are exempt for roughly no reason. Thus it doesn't really make sense as a suggestion since it is basically what the status quo is.

The justice department tried to count all the federal criminal laws once. The best they could come up with was a rough estimate, and that didn't even include state or local laws. There are literally so many criminal laws now that no one is able to count them all, let alone understand them.

Is it fair to penalize someone if they couldn't possibly know their behavior was criminal?

A better solution is probably simplifying and reducing the number of laws, not making the government prove that you knew what you did was against the law.

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