Literally the first law I looked up (The carmack amendment, one of the more important things in trucking law) first paragraph:
(a) General Liability.—
(1) Motor carriers and freight forwarders.—
A carrier providing transportation or service subject to jurisdiction under subchapter I or III of chapter 135 shall issue a receipt or bill of lading for property it receives for transportation under this part. That carrier and any other carrier that delivers the property and is providing transportation or service subject to jurisdiction under subchapter I or III of chapter 135 or chapter 105 are liable to the person entitled to recover under the receipt or bill of lading. The liability imposed under this paragraph is for the actual loss or injury to the property caused by (A) the receiving carrier, (B) the delivering carrier, or (C) another carrier over whose line or route the property is transported in the United States or from a place in the United States to a place in an adjacent foreign country when transported under a through bill of lading and, except in the case of a freight forwarder, applies to property reconsigned or diverted under a tariff under section 13702. Failure to issue a receipt or bill of lading does not affect the liability of a carrier. A delivering carrier is deemed to be the carrier performing the line-haul transportation nearest the destination but does not include a carrier providing only a switching service at the destination.
I can sort of understand that… but I’m not an average person honestly. That’s absolutely anything but crystal clear. It runs 19 paragraphs and references at least a dozen other statutes, all of which must be understood to fully comprehend the rules around this.
I don’t know if you’re a lawyer or not. You might be one of the good lawyers who represents the right sort of people. That doesn’t change the fact that your occupation is massively beyond diminishing returns, and in real life function as paid thugs for the wealthy vs the rest.
In the case of legislation, often times you need to draft laws in a way that enough people can get behind the bill so it can pass. Ambiguous language is a good way to facilitate that. It’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Bored, are you getting mad at attorneys? My impression was you’re just describing a mechanism and output.
VD, to my reading, you’re saying this mechanism and output exists, there’s just debate over whether people contribute to this knowingly or accidentally. Do I understand your point? Thanks for your insight given your background.
Oh I actively dislike attorneys and their net impact on society… which I’m pretty strongly convinced is a large net negative.
Some of the worst rent seekers in the country when taken in aggregate. The presence of some good people who also have law degrees (although they are hugely outnumbered by mercenaries who fight for the highest often very evil bidder) does not make the system itself any better… but instead gives it cover.
You know people suck when popular entertainment works so hard to make them look like heroes. Another great example would be cops, who like attorneys are pretty awful in a macro sense.
They should argue until they can agree on something that benefits the public and isn’t intentionally written in a way that it can mean whatever a person wants it to mean. You’re describing abuse and then saying that it’s better than nothing. It’s pretty obviously way worse than nothing… unless you’re an attorney who can get paid interpreting it in the most favorable light possible for your fat cat client-- who obviously deserves the best legal representation he can afford in your self serving opinion.
I mean they collect huge amounts of economic rent while providing a service that isn’t worth anything in the neighborhood of what it costs… or it wouldn’t be if the rules were written plainly and clearly instead of in the most overwrought way possible so that lawyers could profit off manipulating them.
I’m saying legislation is not drafted to create jobs for attorneys. That is literally never a consideration that has gone into any bill that has ever been drafted. The fact that laws are complex is a natural consequence of the fact that language is imprecise and we live in a complex world. They can be made more complex for a variety of reasons, some good and some not. If you removed lawyers from the equation completely, none of this would change. Boredsocial’s animosity toward the role attorneys play in drafting legislation is misplaced in this context.
Not no lawyers… but about 5-15% of the current number. Most probably should be judges.
The only place where anyone should probably be allowed to actually have an attorney is criminal court where the state would obviously have a prosecutor.
The law should be insanely clear, obvious, and very very easy to comprehend. Most cases would be pretty simple with one side being clearly delusional or absent and forcing the court to hand out a judgement to be enforced.
Our legal system was designed not for efficiency or to hold people accountable, but to allow the wealthy to screw over people with less resources. If you think back to the origins of courts they’ve always been places where the wealthy get the state to be violent to the people who they felt owed them something.
I’m not saying the state shouldn’t enforce contracts, but I am saying that the legal system needs to be hugely streamlined and clarified so that normal people can have equal rights to people who can afford to have a lawyer on retainer… and realistically that’s not going to be possible with the current level of complexity unless every fifth person is a lawyer.
So a Canadian lab got hacked and blackmailed. They paid a ransom to get the data back. Which is all well and good but seems like it was done to save them recovery and recreation. The hackers will surely sell all the data for a second pay day.
The head of the company is named Charles Brown if anyone cares.
Does it though? It doesn’t now despite hundreds of years of trying. Maybe there should be way fewer laws that are way broader and simpler.
Don’t kid yourself, the ultimate impact of the current judicial system is that we have different classes of citizens before the courts. We have the people who have access to good legal representation a phone call away and we have the people who do not. The people who do not are at an absolutely massive disadvantage and are defrauded incredibly frequently by the people who do.
You still haven’t explained why. Maybe it would be better to just have judges decide based on common principles and common sense rather than dense legalese.
I’m talking about the real world impacts of the system you’re defending. It treats the wealthy like a totally different species than people who aren’t wealthy. That’s not a bug it’s a feature. You’re describing how they justify it. I’m saying that’s propaganda and not very good propaganda at that.
What you’re saying sounds noble, and in theory it certainly is… but in practice it’s garden variety evil.
You are just mad at the way language works. When you say “they should argue until they can agree on something that benefits the public” that is so obscure it is has no practical meaning. It depends on what they are trying to accomplish, then you have different views as to what constitutes a benefit, and even what constitutes “the public.” The world is complex, often that sucks and allows people to abuse the legal system, but you complaints here are an incoherent, ignorant mess.
My complaints are incredibly clear. The complexity benefits absolutely no one but people who already have enough power to have their personal representatives in the room when the law gets drafted. I’m saying that if you can’t find a way to write a law in a clear way that protects the public that everyone agrees on you should probably argue until you can agree on what is actually good for the public. I realize this would mean less laws overall, but you’re clearly missing that I don’t think that would be a bad thing.
You’re retreating to ad hominems because you don’t like the fact that I’m pointing out that you’re not actually improving the world by passing ever more complex rules for the benefit of the people with enough influence to get a carve out.
The law doesn’t need to cover every single thing that could happen in the real world. It’s almost always a rear facing ban anyway. Basically person X does new form of shitty behavior that isn’t technically illegal yet so the legislators make that behavior illegal. That isn’t that complicated. You aren’t going to use an instrument as slow moving as the law to anticipate and solve every problem that can crop up in the world, so you really should stop trying.
Your trying is creating a bunch of noise that only benefits the bad people basically.
No, written law is one of the great achievements of civilization. What you are describing is some utopic fantasy that can never work in the real world. Pretty soon they’d find out they don’t know what the common principles actually are and that it isn’t really efficient to start from first principles every single time. So they start writing things down and then some more and still more. Do that for a couple of centuries and you have reached the present.