Like I said in the other thread…there are two main ways people solve disputes; by law, and by violence, and solving disputes by law is a lot better, in my opinion than solving disputes by violence. But two things. First, the law isn’t as hard to understand as you seem to suggest it is. Sure, you need to read it carefuly, and sometimes there are specialized terms you have to learn, just like in any discipline there are specialized terms.
Sure, though, the law probably could be simplified some, but part of the reason it is complex is that special circumstances, or loopholes, or special cases exist that the law then needs to be changed to cover.
Lets take a really simple idea…that a person shouldn’t kill another person, and if he does, the state should punish him somehow. That’s a pretty basic idea, and almost every society, almost every culture, has come up with the idea that people shouldn’t be allowed to kill other people willy-nilly. So, now lets turn that into a law.
When we’re turning this into a law, we first realize that maybe there are times it’s ok to kill someone, and the state shouldn’t punish you for doing it. We might want to say it’s ok, for example, for a soldier to kill the enemy in wartime, or for you to kill someone if that’s the only way to stop them from killing you or someone else. What if you kill someone by accident? We might want to say that you shouldn’t be punished for that. But what if you kill someone by being reckless? Maybe you should be punished for that, but maybe not as severely as if you did it on purpose. We also might want to say that if you plan out somebody’s death, that might be more serious than if you murder someone because you got angry with them, but didn’t plan it out first. So we might say, “Ok, we’ll set punishments differently in all these different circumstances.”
Ok, so now we’ve defined murder, but our problems are just beginning. Lets say that we think you committed murder. Now we need to find some way to see if that’s true. We might want to leave that up to a jury to decide, but now we need rules about how to pick a jury. And to get the fairest result, we might want to make sure that nobody on the jury is biased for you or against you, so we need to make rules about that.
So, now that we have a jury, we need to decide on rules of evidence…we need to decide what’s acceptable to show that you did or didn’t commit the crime. If we find out that a gun you own fired the bullet that killed the person, is that good evidence? If we find out you said to your friend “I’m going to kill him”, is that good evidence? If we find out that your friend told somebody else, “jrfranchi is going to kill John Doe”, is that good evidence? What if you’ve confessed to the police? What if the police hurt you or threatened you to get you to confess? Maybe we need to write laws protecting people who have been accused of crimes from things like that. All of these things require rules and laws too.
So lets say you’ve been convicted and sentenced to prison, but you don’t think that’s fair, so you want the verdict overrulled. So now we need rules about appeal. What sorts of things are enough to get a verdict changed, and what aren’t? We need to decide that.
So, now, starting from a simple idea, that we should punish people who kill other people, we’ve created a whole lot of law. And that’s just one thing. We also want to make sure that people don’t cheat each other people, that employers don’t exploit their employees, that the environment is protected, that people can eat food that’s safe, and so on. All of these things require laws, and so they stack up.
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