zlacker

>>gruseo+(OP)
As a person with essentially libertarian views, this is a very interesting article. I may be too quick to applaud this article because it supports my own views, but I think it raises a number of legitimate concerns. In particular, I was struck by this point: In many criminal cases, the common-law requirement that a defendant must have a mens rea (ie, he must or should know that he is doing wrong) has been weakened or erased. This is a slope that we have been sliding down for some time. While ignorance of the law has generally been excluded as a defense in criminal cases, our system of laws is becoming so convoluted that it is almost impossible to know and understand the applicable law. Thus we are all at risk. It feels like we keep inching closer to a society where everyone is either a dependent of the state, or at risk of becoming one through regulation and/or prosecution.

>>Alex63+46
Yea, I would generally agree with you. The problems of the law is that it's largely made and enforced in a arbitrary and over-complicated way.

On a startup side, there is actually is a big difference between common law (e.g. Anglo) and civil law (e.g. Franco) systems - with common law being more advantageous to entrepreneurship because of the reduced risk of arbitrary laws - unlike precedence in common law systems.

PDF: http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/eblj/issues/volume1/number2/Smith.p...

>>nickpi+S6
But civil law more easily may degrade in a byzantine mess. Here in Italy there are more than 100,000 laws (estimated, for no one really knows, and this is just for national laws, and not including technical regulations). Which means that no one is realistically able to understand what is right and what is not. Under such a system, one lives with sort of a random fatalism.

>>blue1+u7
Not just random fatalism, but also greater acceptance of the idea that individuals can pay authorities not to enforce the vast and unknowable system of laws.

>>Alex63+J7
Italy is not corrupt enough for this. The law is more or less applied (more or less also depending on the region) but in a random, chaotic, occasional fashion, because an uniform application is really impossible. It's a bit like the idea of sin. You shouldn't do it, but human nature is what it is. Provided you keep within certain limits.

>>blue1+L8
You are much more familiar with the situation in Italy than I am. My comment was based on Codes of the Underworld (Diego Gambetta, 2009, Princeton University Press). On page 70, he says:

"The wider the range of possible transgressions, the greater the amount of potential information available for mutual blackmailing... Italy is a country with a high level of corruption that has proved hard to explain...Italy has in excess of 100,000 laws and regulations...The probability of living a life, indeed of going through the day, without incurring at least one violation must be virtually zero for Italians... It seems plausible therefore to hypothesize that the high levels of corruption in Italy could depend on the fact that everybody has some dirt on everybody else."

My apologies if I have been misled by this.

>>Alex63+X9
Actually, it strongly depends on the region. I live in one of the "lawful" ones.