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Comment by froh | Hacker News Reader

This is counter thousands of years of legal tradition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignorantia_juris_non_excusat:

> Ignorantia juris non excusat (Legal principle)

> Ignorantia juris non excusat or ignorantia legis neminem excusat (Latin for "ignorance of the law excuses not" and "ignorance of law excuses no one" respectively) is a legal principle holding that a person who is unaware of a law may not escape liability for violating that law merely by being unaware of its content.

> European-law countries with a tradition of Roman law may also use an expression from Aristotle translated into Latin: nemo censetur ignorare legem (nobody is thought to be ignorant of the law) or ignorantia iuris nocet (not knowing the law is harmful).

And if Wikipedia is no authority for you maybe the bible is:

Leviticus 5:17: "If a person sins and does what is forbidden in any of the LORD's commands, even though he does not know it, he is guilty and will be held responsible."

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No. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse" is what you say to the defendant who claims they can't be prosecuted because they didn't know. This is about, in essence, prosecutorial discretion.

If everybody was prosecuted for breaking all the laws they didn't know existed, everybody would be in prison.

Also, the old principle was reasonable when the law consisted of things like "don't kill people or steal stuff" which everybody can be reasonably expected to know whether or not they ever read the book where it's written down. That doesn't quite work when you're talking about every obscure detail of the 70,000 pages in the Federal Register.

Really? Because the bible has all sorts of weird rules in it that seem kind of arbitrary and certainly not self-obvious.

The principle is reasonable because otherwise everyone would just claim they didn't know regardless of if they did

> Really? Because the bible has all sorts of weird rules in it that seem kind of arbitrary and certainly not self-obvious.

Nobody said it was perfect, as they say.

> The principle is reasonable because otherwise everyone would just claim they didn't know regardless of if they did

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25830167

> Nobody said it was perfect, as they say

Not saying it is perfect or imperfect. Just saying the imagined time when all rules were self-obvious natural laws that could be logically deduced a priori, never existed.

The laws that were both actually enforced and reasonable basically were. I don't think we need to emulate things people historically said they would do even though they didn't, or did do but were unreasonable.

That seems circular to me. Surely most people follow the laws that seem reasonable to them. If everyone agreed on what was reasonable behaviour, we wouldn't need laws.

Basically everybody knows that murder is wrong but some people still do it.

People do try and argue its justified in specific circumstances. Sometimes people have an over-active imagination for what constitutes self-defense.

Hell, trump pardoned someone convicted of murder (which is disgusting, but i guess he thought it was reasonable).

But my main point is there was never a time or society where the only crime was murder.

A Lot of people claim their bible is perfect, dontcha know...

In ancient times, the clergy were the scientists, but they had to communicate with people who had no scientific literacy. So instead of saying “We’ve autopsied some people who died and it looks like eating undercooked pork might destroy your heart” they say “Sky Guy says no pork” and achieve the public health outcome.

Or maybe its because pork allegedly tastes similar to human and canibalism is taboo (for good reason). Or any other theory that's out there. Hard to say at the remove of thousands of years. Either way, its definitely not something that can be deduced a priori from logic by a lay person.

You have a source on this? I’m much more inclined to think it’s just religions imposing order on people as a litmus test for conformity and followership. Mormons have the Word of Wisdom, Islam has haram and halal, Catholics have Lent, Good Friday, Ash Wednesday, etc... They don’t seem to follow any prescriptive health benefit. It’s restriction for the sake of conformity.

Religion is complicated and built up over thousands of years. I am sure some rules are to designate an in-group/unity, some are based on the best belief at the time for the public good, some are probably arbitrary dictates from whomever happened to be in charge at the time. I think it would be a mistake to lump all the rules together (just as it would be a mistake to lump all of our modern laws together). Some are also self obvious, for example, i believe one of the kosher rules is dont eat animals that have been poisioned.

As far as pork specificly - i imagine nobody really knows, but there's some speculation at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_restrictions_on_the_...

There was a chapter in a game theory book I read that talked about this.

It said that rituals and rules can serve as a way to raise the cost of being in the religion, which can help keep people who don't really believe in the religion out. The book had a cartoon showing a man standing in front of a "Church Picnic" sign and he had a thought balloon that said "I'll pretend to love Jesus for a free hamburger!".

The tangible benefits of being accepted as being a member of a church can be considerable, far beyond the occasional free hamburger at a church picnic. Members of a church will often when they need services or need to buy things look first to providers that are in their church.

If all it takes to convince them you are one of them is showing up at services occasionally and giving a small donation now and then, that is a price many non-believers would pay.

Annoying rituals and rules raise that price. For the true believers who are in the church because they believe that it is the only way to not spend an eternity being tortured in hell, church is worth it even with the onerous rituals and rules.

For the person who is only there because he thinks it will get him a few more customers for his landscaping business, the rules and rituals can make it not worth it.

> The tangible benefits of being accepted as being a member of a church can be considerable

My step father is quite conservative and he and I don’t see eye to eye on much, but one time he pointed out how the declining religiosity of my generation meant an increased reliance on the state for social programs that the church once filled the need for, and I’ve never been able to stop seeing that function of religion since.

When thinking about religion, i think its important to keep in mind that way back in the day it was basically the state

Even today. It's still pretty much the state where I live. Utah's legislature is more or less at the whim of the LDS church. I get what you're saying, though. Church and state both have a shared goal of social welfare, to some degree.

I’m not saying all restrictions are for public health benefit... but a lot of them are. Specifically, the kosher dietary rules (no pork, no shellfish which could have red tide, no rabbits, complicated guidelines on how to sever an animal’s neck without hitting the spinal cord, no animals that died of natural causes, separate utensils for meat and dairy) make a lot of sense in the environment of 2000 years ago.

If you treat Leviticus as guidelines when stuck in a primitive area, it makes a bit more sense. One of the old (1890ish) US Army survival manuals is basically Leviticus rewritten in modern terms. Technology and modern health and cleanliness standards pretty much make that section ignorable.

Some juicy federal crimes we're all expected to know from @CrimeADay on Twitter

26 USC §5674(b) & 27 CFR §25.144(a) make it a federal crime for a brewer to remove beer from a brewery in a keg that has the name of more than one brewer on it.

21 USC §§331, 333 & 21 CFR §169.115(a) make it a federal crime to sell French dressing if less than 35% of its weight is vegetable oil.

43 USC §1733 & 43 CFR §6302.20(e) make it a federal crime to pick someone up from a federal wilderness area using a hot air balloon.

7 USC §8303, §8313 & 9 CFR §93.318(b) make it a federal crime to bring an American horse back into the United States after being in a Canadian rodeo without a health certificate.

42 USC §6928 & 40 CFR §257.3–8(b) make it a federal crime to start a dangerous garbage fire.

21 USC §331, 333, 343 & 21 CFR §155.201(a)(2)(v) make it a federal crime to sell canned "random sliced" mushrooms unless they were sliced in a random manner.

"Have you ever clogged a toilet in a national forest? That could get you six months in federal prison. Written a letter to a pirate? You might be looking at three years in the slammer. Leaving the country with too many nickels, drinking a beer on a bicycle in a national park, or importing a pregnant polar bear are all very real crimes, and this riotously funny, ridiculously entertaining, and fully illustrated book shows how just about anyone can become—or may already be—a federal criminal."

https://www.amazon.com/How-Become-Federal-Criminal-Illustrat...

There are some stupid laws on the books, but you have picked awful examples. Only one of those laws is something a non-specialist would ever encounter, and that one is common sense.

Everyone should know that burning garbage can be dangerous.

Anyone who operates a hot air balloon should know how to use it safely.

Anyone who works with animals should know about the risks of spreading disease.

Anyone who works with food should know about food labelling laws.

> Some juicy federal crimes we're all expected to know

No, we are not all expected to know them.

The first one is from a part of the tax code that covers taxation on alcohol sales. If you are not involved in the commercial beer brewing industry, you do not need to know it.

The second one is part of the rules on interstate commerce in food, drugs, and cosmetics. Again, most of us have no need to know it. Same with the sixth one.

The third is from the laws governing public lands. If you aren't going to fly your hot air balloon into a Federal wilderness area, there is no need to know it.

...and so on.

Yes, you don't need to know them until you need to know them. But then you do.

If you become a weapons manufacturer I’m sure there’s also a lot to know, much of which will appear as completely niche law to everyone else.

So what the presidential order says is it's at the discretion of the prosecution if they press or drop charges, and the don't have an obligation any more to prosecute federal crimes? How is the "we, the people" represented in this discrimination? How is it supervised and controlled and "corrected" if the wrong crimes are not prosecuted?

Prosecutorial discretion is already the law of the land. Prosecutors don't have the resources to prosecute every crime. They also do not have the obligation to prosecute every crime.

https://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-procedure/what-is-pros...

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/prosecutorial-discre...

This does not work when even the government cannot count the number of crimes (and criminal laws), and when Governors accidentally and unknowingly admit to committing crimes:

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

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

https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2013/03/frequent-reference-questio...

https://www.amazon.com/How-Become-Federal-Criminal-Illustrat...

https://twitter.com/CrimeADay

https://abcnews.go.com/US/york-gov-cuomo-ruffles-feathers-re...

The defenses available to a defendant have nothing to do with prudent lawmaking. This order simply advises regulators to not make criminal law without careful consideration of the harms of doing so.

Ignorance of the law is a valid excuse ... for the kinds of laws that Congress can see themselves breaking.

All kinds of laws have a "willfulness" requirement, which means that you had to do something on purpose. For things like vehicular manslaughter or public indecency, this means that you had to purposefully do something bad with your vehicle or expose yourself. Tragic vehicular and wardrobe malfunctions do not meet the willfulness requirement.

But the issue happens when you apply this standard to white collar crimes, because this makes knowledge of the law a legal requirement to being convicted of it. For example, let's consider the IRS own handbook[0] on tax crimes. This book explicitly includes wilfulness as an element for tax evasion on page 15. It defines wilfullness on page 17 as:

> Willfulness is defined as the "voluntary, intentional violation of a known legal duty."

It also helpfully notes (also on page 17)

> Willfulness is subjectively measured. A defendant's good faith belief that he is not violating the tax laws, no matter how objectively unreasonable that belief may be, is a defense in a tax prosecution.

So yes, if you're avoiding paying your taxes, ignorance of the law is a valid defense, and in fact the IRS agrees. This also applies to bank fraud, election rule fraud, etc. etc.

0 - https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/tax_crimes_handbook.pdf

Willfulness is a completely different thing that knowing the law. Willfulness only requires that I intend to do what I did, not that I knew it was illegal.

If I somehow don't know that killing people is illegal and I intentionally shoot someone, the excuse that I didn't know it was illegal doesn't get me anywhere (even assuming the court believes me).

If, on the other hand, I didn't intend to kill someone, that does lessen the severity of the crime or even eliminate it if it was truly a freak accident where I couldn't reasonably have prevented it by exercising more caution.

Right, but the IRS themselves say that a genuine but misguided belief that what you’re doing is legal is a valid defense against the charge of tax evasion.

The result is that ignorance is a defense, at least for some types of laws.

Well, I'll counter that "Mens rea" is a legal traditional just as old, because lawmakers even thousands of years ago understood the injustice of punishing people for actions they could not reasonably know were crimes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea

Exactly, as mentioned by the order itself, which also takes in strict liability crimes and sets a posture that they should be as limited as possible.

Mens rea doesn't require that you know that the thing you are doing is illegal. It only requires that you know you are doing the thing.

Depends on how the law is written. Some (but not all) statutes require prosecution to show that defendant knew it was illegal.

No ... this had never been an absolute rule. It’s generally true. It it’s not some absolute or time honored principle of justice.

There are plenty of courts, including American ones, that treat extremely counterintuitive laws different.

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