Naughty RS driver ...

Originally posted by JimC

Originally posted by JimC

I was mulling over the other day how strange the legal system is...

We are all expected to obey all applicable laws all the time, and if we don't we are subject to penalties up to and including permanent incarceration.

We receive little or no training as to what the law actually is.

We are not really notified officially when the law changes.

The law is so complex that even fully trained professionals have to specialise in limited areas of it to get a reasonable understanding.

The process that establishes whether we broke the law or not requires at least half a dozen expensive and fully trained professionals and takes at least hours, and possibly days or even weeks.

Almost all of the time, though, we know the law in general and follow it.  In most cases it's only a tiny fraction of the time that the breach is so outrageous or (on the other hand) the situation is so complicated that it becomes an issue.

As an analogy, in a regatta 50 boats may spend 5 hours each consciously and subconsciously following the rules; even if you don't consciously think about the rules, you won't tack onto port because a starboard tacker is on your hip. Out of that 250 hours of racing, maybe a total of 10 seconds will end up in the room.

I used to get rid of dodgy lawyers, and in that field of law there were tens of thousands of matters a year that went off perfectly well - yet that was never mentioned when tiny minority of dodgy cases hit the public eye.

As for the complexity of the laws, it's like our chats with the guys in the $500 development class on the Boat Design Forum - they don't understand why rules have to be so complex because they have not seen what happens to simple rules.

Although improving and simplifying the law is great, complication and disputes are just inevitable product of society, aren't they?

PS - I do agree that some of the guys in that stream of traffic may well have been assuming that they were being diverted by the police, and been unable to react in time when they saw that wasn't the case.  The bus driver, though....

Edited by Chris 249 - 23 Jul 15 at 12:31am