Some of the most profitable ventures this century have been objectively illegal, but when you know you won't go to prison for violating the law, why would you care to follow it?
human dissection (grave robbing)
translating the Bible into English
silk production outside of China (death penalty for exporting worm eggs)
rubber production in Asia (seeds smuggled out of Brazil)
the Underground Railroad
heliocentrism
AIDS treatment (see Dallas Buyers Club)
Needle exchange programs for IV drug users
Ridesharing/airbnb/napster (obvious ones)
SF gay marriage licenses (in defiance of CA law)The same for heliocentrism. No one took Copernicus to court.
With silk and rubber the smuggling was illegal, the actual cultivation was not
Grave robbing was illegal (and still is) but dissection was not.
Needle exchange was illegal in some US states but was legal in many other countries.
You can nitpick that "the church executing people for it" is not exactly the same as "illegal" but that's missing the point.
While there were bans or a requirement for authorisation of translations of the Bible in certain times and places (mostly the 1300s to 1500s) the first translations of (parts of the) Bible into English had been done centuries before this, some as early at the 7th century. This makes them some of the oldest written works we know of in English at all. They were also done by the church.
> You can nitpick that "the church executing people for it" is not exactly the same as "illegal" but that's missing the point.
When did this happen? Tyndale was tried and executed by the secular authorities in a place where there were no laws against translating the Bible.
The earliest translations into English were done by the Church.
>Needle exchange was illegal in some US states but was legal in many other countries
I'm not sure what your point is here
I tried to find a source on this but it doesn't seem to be true? The first chapter of this book describes the history of chlorination: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/Chlorina... (which is a source Wikipedia cites) and it doesn't appear to mention anything about illegally chlorinating water. After looking in that book I asked ChatGPT to find a source for the claim, and it reported the claim was false. Chlorination was initially controversial but I can't find anything claiming it was illegal?
I do still disagree for the following reasons:
- Jersey City started chlorinating in 1908; Maidstone, England started chlorinating in 1897 and Lincoln, England started chlorinating in 1905. So Jersey City wasn't the first to chlorinate their water.
However, Jersey City seems to be the first deployment in the United States, so perhaps that is what you meant. If this were the only issue I would concede the point.
- This was a civil matter and not a criminal matter.
- The dispute wasn't whether chlorination was legal or acceptable but whether it was sufficient to deliver "pure and wholesome" water. The city wanted them to build a sewer. The utility didn't really dispute that there was a water quality issue but they built a chlorination plant instead of building a sewer (while the lawsuit was still ongoing).
- The water utility won. They demonstrated that chlorination was sufficient.
That's the impression I took from Wikipedia and this writeup: https://www.dolmetsch.com/chlorination_history.pdf (Starting on page 4)