Compendium of mushy logic with no limiting principle

[Pointedstick]

I've alluded to this a lot recently, but thought it might be fun to compile a thread full of examples of politicians exhibiting what I call, "mushy logic with no limiting principle", which is a mindset that societies make tradeoffs between supposedly conflicting ideas, that any level of sacrifice of one in the name of preserving or expanding the other is theoretically acceptable, and that there is no limiting principle guiding any hard limits on one or another.

Here's one I saw today, straight from the mouth of our president:

Barack Obama: Well, in the end, and what I’ve said, and I continue to believe, is that we don’t have to sacrifice our freedom in order to achieve security. That’s a false choice. That doesn’t mean that there are not tradeoffs involved in any given program, in any given action that we take. So all of us make a decision that we go through a whole bunch of security at airports, which when we were growing up that wasn’t the case…. And so that’s a tradeoff we make, the same way we make a tradeoff about drunk driving. We say, “Occasionally there are going to be checkpoints. They may be intrusive.”? To say there’s a tradeoff doesn’t mean somehow that we’ve abandoned freedom.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/17/in-fir ... -requests/

Funny how all of these tradeoffs always result in the government gaining more power, never the other way around. We seem to be seeing an awful lot of this "I had to destroy your civil liberties in order to save them!" type thinking lately…

[Mountaineer]

Sounds to me like that verbal nothingness might have emanated from an orifice other than the anointed ones mouth.  Not that I don't like fuzzy logic or anything like it some or most of the time in general, unless there are conflicting positions, usually coming from the "others" worldviews in which I might have to reexamine the evidence and consider it for a while, perhaps even convene a blue ribbon committee or three and do a few polls to determine which way the buffalo run on this particular but not universal course of action before I could take a firm position, unless of course, a firm position might be in order so as not to alienate the undocumented voters, oops, I mean Democrats of undocumentation but of probable loyalty to the brilliance of my narcissistic speech patterns .......

[Pointedstick]

From a recent NYT article about the (no longer so) secret court:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/us/in ... .html?_r=0

In one of the court’s most important decisions, the judges have expanded the use in terrorism cases of a legal principle known as the “special needs”? doctrine and carved out an exception to the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of a warrant for searches and seizures, the officials said.

The special needs doctrine was originally established in 1989 by the Supreme Court in a ruling allowing the drug testing of railway workers, finding that a minimal intrusion on privacy was justified by the government’s need to combat an overriding public danger. Applying that concept more broadly, the FISA judges have ruled that the N.S.A.’s collection and examination of Americans’ communications data to track possible terrorists does not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment, the officials said.

[moda0306]

The only problem I have with your point, which I like in theory, is that the logical conclusion in your direction (government shouldn't coerce people) has the same problem... no limiting principal... until we've essentially abolished all government, and I deem the end results to be pretty scary as well.

But at least you're willing to accept that... most "libertarians" stop wanting less government when it's convenient.  You admit the logical conclusion is a stateless society.

And I also disagree (for the hundredth time... sorry) that the government is actually taking more freedoms away than they used to.  Based on my analysis, enforcing slavery and the draft is far more coercive, in practice, than taxation to support a social safety net, infrastucture, etc. 

So we're really moving towards qualitative differences that may be difficult to put on a quantitative measure as to whether we have "more" or "less" government.  I consider unavoidable (sorry, but you can avoid most taxes and regulatons as an individual), life-altering abuses to be by far the most offensive "big government," no matter how small a portion of GDP it took them to put a bullet in my head, or someone else's.

The police may be a different matter, though, of course.

[MediumTex]

One of the best reasons for a person to attend law school is that it equips you well to be left alone by the government to the greatest extent possible.

The only group of people that the government may hesitate to run over without a thought are attorneys.  They still run over these people as well, but it is often much harder to do, and the government sometimes loses these fights, which is always very humiliating for the state.

I always cringe when I watch these cop shows and they ask the suspect whether he wants to talk to an attorney before he talks to them and he says no.  That's almost always a bad decision.

[Benko]

One of the best reasons for a person to attend law school is that it equips you well to be left alone by the government to the greatest extent possible.

So as a non-lawyer is there some e.g. law for dummies or some reasonable body of knowledge that could/should be acquired to protect ourselves to some extent?

[MediumTex]

One of the best reasons for a person to attend law school is that it equips you well to be left alone by the government to the greatest extent possible.

So as a non-lawyer is there some e.g. law for dummies or some reasonable body of knowledge that could/should be acquired to protect ourselves to some extent?

Learn to visualize the legal constraints under which the government operates in a given situation and act within that structure.

Sometimes there are more constraints on the government than others, but there are always some constraints.

As an Army drill instructor once told me: "You gotta know your book."  When I asked what book he was referring to, he said "It don't matter, but everyone has a book.  Find yours and know it."

One thing that all authority figures rely on is understanding the rules on which their authority is based better than the people who are subject to the authority figure's authority.  If, however, you know the authority figure's "book" better than he does it can disrupt the power balance in unpredictable ways and create space for your own interests that may not have existed before.

One example of this sort of thing happened years ago when my wife got a traffic ticket for speeding in a construction zone.  I reviewed all state laws that had a bearing on the ticket she had received and discovered that there was a certain type of motion that could be made that would make available to the defendant a defensive driving course that wouldn't otherwise be available to them for construction zone infractions, which would ultimately allow the ticket to be dismissed.

I made the motion in court and explained to the judge what I was doing (he had never heard of it and the city attorney certainly had never heard of it).  After I explained it to him and he was getting ready to send me to the clerk to get the defensive driving paperwork, I realized that almost every case in court that day involved a construction zone infraction as well (the city liked to issue these because the fines were doubled and you normally couldn't get out of it by taking defensive driving).  Upon realizing that the rest of the people in the courtroom were in the same situation I told the judge that I could go to each one of them and offer to handle their case on a pro bono basis and make the same motion for them I had made for my wife, which would cause court to drag on far longer than it otherwise would, or the judge could simply treat everyone in the courtroom the same way he was treating my wife by using his discretion to dismiss each case conditioned upon the timely completion of a defensive driving course.  He thought about it and said that it would save time to just ask who would be interested in defensive driving and go ahead and let them leave the courtroom to get the defensive driving paperwork.  When he asked the people in the court about 90% of the people raised their hands and we all walked out of the courtroom together with the city attorney looking bewildered.

That's the sort of thing I'm talking about.  I simply knew the book better than the authority figure on that particular day and it shifted the power balance dramatically.

[Pointedstick]

MT, that's an amazing story.

Can a non-lawyer make motions like this? How would one go about doing so? Could you maybe do a little "Using the law for non-lawyers" bit?

Or would you always recommend engaging the services of an attorney? Obviously for big problems that's a no-brainer, but for a traffic ticket, it doesn't seem worth it if you can't do something so clever yourself.

[MediumTex]

MT, that's an amazing story.

Can a non-lawyer make motions like this? How would one go about doing so? Could you maybe do a little "Using the law for non-lawyers" bit?

A good attorney can digest a lot of legal research in a short period of time without being afraid of missing something because he isn't familiar with the overall structure of a statute (assuming he IS familiar with the statute).

I would say that a non-lawyer could do any of the stuff I am describing, but the probability of missing something is much higher and other attorneys and judges are never going to give you the benefit of the doubt on anything.

As an attorney I can go into any courtroom and normally I will get a certain basic level of respect and deference, while a non-lawyer will virtually never get similar treatment.  Other attorneys will pull procedural bullshit with non-attorneys representing themselves that they would never try against another attorney.

[MediumTex]

MT, that's an amazing story.

Can a non-lawyer make motions like this? How would one go about doing so? Could you maybe do a little "Using the law for non-lawyers" bit?

Or would you always recommend engaging the services of an attorney? Obviously for big problems that's a no-brainer, but for a traffic ticket, it doesn't seem worth it if you can't do something so clever yourself.

I'm interested in this response as well.  As it so happens, I got a ticket over the weekend, and am mulling over how to handle it.

I looked back at the loophole I had discovered in the story above a few years later and found that it had been removed from the statute (probably at the urging of a lobbyist representing the interests of municipalities who rely on trafic fines to fund their operations).

You have to stay on your toes when keeping up with your "book."

[doodle]

MT, that's an amazing story.

Can a non-lawyer make motions like this? How would one go about doing so? Could you maybe do a little "Using the law for non-lawyers" bit?

A good attorney can digest a lot of legal research in a short period of time without being afraid of missing something because he isn't familiar with the overall structure of a statute (assuming he IS familiar with the statute).

I would say that a non-lawyer could do any of the stuff I am describing, but the probability of missing something is much higher and other attorneys and judges are never going to give you the benefit of the doubt on anything.

As an attorney I can go into any courtroom and normally I will get a certain basic level of respect and deference, while a non-lawyer will virtually never get similar treatment.  Other attorneys will pull procedural bullshit with non-attorneys representing themselves that they would never try against another attorney.

Sounds like a skill particularly well suited for a robot. I wonder if a robot that can digest and interpret case law is being worked on.

[MediumTex]

MT, that's an amazing story.

Can a non-lawyer make motions like this? How would one go about doing so? Could you maybe do a little "Using the law for non-lawyers" bit?

A good attorney can digest a lot of legal research in a short period of time without being afraid of missing something because he isn't familiar with the overall structure of a statute (assuming he IS familiar with the statute).

I would say that a non-lawyer could do any of the stuff I am describing, but the probability of missing something is much higher and other attorneys and judges are never going to give you the benefit of the doubt on anything.

As an attorney I can go into any courtroom and normally I will get a certain basic level of respect and deference, while a non-lawyer will virtually never get similar treatment.  Other attorneys will pull procedural bullshit with non-attorneys representing themselves that they would never try against another attorney.

Sounds like a skill particularly well suited for a robot. I wonder if a robot that can digest and interpret case law is being worked on.

No.  That's not work that a robot can do.  As I understand it, robots and computers don't do that well with functions that are highly intuitive and where the correct interpretation of a data set is influenced by the norms and traditions of a certain group of people or community.

I've seen system and process designers attempt to turn the application of legal principles into a process that anyone can follow and it never works very well--i.e., even human robots struggle with it.