25 Jan 2009
HB 1309

is a bill introduced in our General Assembly covering the sale of processed food products by farmers. The digest printed ast the top of the link says:

Home based processors and microprocessors. Establishes a program to allow home based processors and microprocessors to prepare and sell certain food products. Establishes requirements for home based processors and microprocessors. Establishes certification requirements for home based microprocessors. Requires the Purdue University cooperative extension service to provide training programs for home based microprocessors.

So far, it sounds like a Good Thing™ - but upon reading (or trying to read) the blasted thing, I must honestly confess that I don't know! And that's the point.

Click the link - read it for yourself, if you can. Now, without reference to books or the Internet, tell me exactly what constitutes a "food product". Can't do it. This bill isn't written in English, it's written in a database language called "legalese", and I'd bet my bottom dollar that the whole codex is rife with referential integrity problems.

In fact, there are whole corps of bureaucrats who are in charge of attempting to insure the referential integrity of "the law" and a good part of the job of the courts these days consists in resolving referential integrity within the law.

Of course, if I really want to know what the law means, I can just go hire an attorney to interpret it for me. Maybe he'll be right, or at least in agreement with the majority of the referential integrity checkers employed by law enforcement, or maybe his interpretation will have to be adjudicated in a court. Who knows?

It strikes me that this is a core problem with our society - nobody really knows what the law is. We've left common sense and common language long behind in our vain attempt to codify all potential human behavior. I can assure my lawyerly friends as a data professional that this is a fool's errand: there are too many variables that change too quickly for there ever to be anything approaching rational relational integrity in law codes taking this approach. This is why we are increasingly ending up "bound hand and foot with red tape, and skewered through and through with office pens" as Dickens observed.

Most folks don't worry about such things, of course. They just live their lives using common sense and hope for the best. Sometimes it works, but increasingly it doesn't, and they find themselves running afoul of the law. In my opinion, ignorance of the law may not be an excuse, but incomprehensibility of the law should be. If a random sample of voters cannot accurately describe a laws meaning and effect, then that law should be rendered void.

And in fact, we still have a rule like this: jury nullification. It still happens, but the lawyers hate it with a passion, primarily because nullification goes beyond the question of comprehensibility and also strikes at the very root: justice. A jury can refuse to convict if the jury believe the law itself to be unjust: this is the core foundation of the jury system.

The primary function of the independent juror is not, as many think, to dispense punishment to fellow citizens accused of breaking various laws, but rather to protect fellow citizens from tyrannical abuses of power by government.
Indeed, if juries do not have the right and power to nullify the law, we must face the fact that Harriet Tubman, one of the great heroines of American history, would and should have been guilty of multiple federal crimes by violating the fugitive slave laws. That is a morally revolting prospect, but judges today who reject nullification must confess that they would enforce the fugitive slave laws and convict Harriet Tubman. If they were to honestly admit as much, and hold themselves powerless to disobey unjust and morally despicable laws, they should be told that "obeying orders" was not accepted as a defense in the Nazi war crime trials at Nuremberg.

Educate yourself.

10:40 /Agriculture | 2 comments | permanent link