Recommended: at Slate, Tim Wu of Columbia has a five-part series in progress on the phenomenon of laws whose violation is very widespread and broadly tolerated. His examples include laws against (certain) recreational drug use, possession of obscene material, (some) copyright infringement by end users, and (promised in the final segment) immigration. (One that might have been added: low-level gambling in the form of office football pools and the Supreme Court poker game.) His opening anecdote:
At the federal prosecutor’s office in the Southern District of New York, the staff, over beer and pretzels, used to play a darkly humorous game. Junior and senior prosecutors would sit around, and someone would name a random celebrity — say, Mother Teresa or John Lennon.
It would then be up to the junior prosecutors to figure out a plausible crime for which to indict him or her.
(via Katherine Mangu-Ward, Reason “Hit and Run”). More from Hans Bader.
7 Comments
Low-level gambling of the kind you describe lacks that universality of a federal angle (assuming your football pool doesn’t cross state lines, use the mail, etc.) that the other examples have. Private gambling where the “house” takes no cut is certainly legal in many jurisdictions in the US….
Considering that we have more of our population behind bars than any other country in the world I’m damn glad that they miss something.
No mention of federal tax returns? Speeding laws? Especially in the latter, we learn to ignore certain laws at a very young age.
I think it’s just a function of shifting power bases.
Shelby Steele notes in his book “White Guilt” that 50 years ago, sex was taboo, while racial matters were openly discussed. Today it’s the reverse. The DOJ won’t prosecute pornography, but it will go after “hate crimes.”
“One that might have been added: low-level gambling in the form of office football pools….”
Except that that’s legal in some places, including Texas.
“It would then be up to the junior prosecutors to figure out a plausible crime for which to indict him or her.”
Right, and one of the defense’s arguments should be that the executive branch’s actions constitute an illegal attainder. If the legislative can’t pass a bill of attainder, the executive branch sure as hell can’t execute an attainder.
“A nation of lawbreakers”
I think that should read, “A nation of absurd laws”.
We ignore laws because
1) there ar far, far, far, far, FAR, FAR, FAR too many of them. It is literally impossible for any one person to know the whole law of this country (yes, I’m using literally as defined, not as a generic emphatic adjective).
2. Adding laws is easier than getting rid of them (for reasons of politics and other stupid things), so laws we no longer want are much easier just to ignore by common agreement than to actually void through the proper process.