[retcon]

Equally it's a sorry indictment of our economic times that the meaning of unlawful has been hammered into a understanding that non prohibition is permission. This aggressive and putative new use is refuted by every founding principle of the common law in Anglo Saxon countries and most of the western world. See the argument of letter vs. spirit for a effect.

Ed. cleared up phrasing around new use, replaced meaning with use for .. meaning.

[brian_cloutier]

> This aggressive and putative new use is refuted by every founding principle of the common law in Anglo Saxon countries

Which founding principles, exactly? Your comment seems to imply you think we should live in a world where we are only allowed to pick our actions from an enumerated list of approved actions. That world is extremely contrary to the kind of world I would like to live in, but also seems to contradict most of what I know about the history of the western world. Is that really what you mean?

[pdpi]

> Is that really what you mean?

I'm fairly certain that's not what OP meant, no.

What OP is getting at is that the common law tradition isn't to explicitly spell out all the nuances of when that action is actually disallowed, but rather to set out the general principles, and let case law define the precise limits of that boundary. In contrast, the civil law tradition is very much based on statutory law explicitly setting the boundaries, and case law serving only to disambiguate.

The "aggressive and putative new use" they're referring to is basically taking common law's fuzzy boundaries and pushing a civil law interpretation on top where all the grey areas are assumed to be allowed.

[brian_cloutier]

That was a very clear explanation, thank you!

[Georgelemental]

> non prohibition is permission

That is exactly how things work. Unless the government goes through the effort of passing a law to prohibit something (and getting approval of the people's elected representatives, and the courts), then the thing is legal. How else do you propose things should work?

[cmroanirgo]

Those "pushing the boundaries" always end up using a similar logic. However, there's always going to be a large segment of society whose rules are based around non financially oriented methodologies, such as: "morals", or directly from spiritual texts which disallow certain practices, or historical "customs". Such things are not "illegal" per se, but it's largely held as being reprehensible by a large number of people nevertheless & causes a large amount of friction within society.

Then there's the issue of marketing/propaganda (which the parent mentions as "hammered") whose sole purpose it's to change people's minds in an emotional way. I wish people would learn about Edward Bernays, nephew of Freud, who instituted this. In and of itself, propaganda has never been illegal, but no one likes to admit to being emotionally manipulated. (But when you begin to pay attention to your emotions, you can spot this stuff from a mile away).

[masswerk]

I think, what you are addressing is social convention and social norms, which are enforced by social sanctions only. However, while these are soft norms, laws are hard norms and enforced by the legal system, which is an important difference. Therefor (however we may feel about this) something may be intuitively and morally wrong, but still perfectly legal. Still, this may subject to social action, which may be what you are aiming at. This is, what civil society is about.

[judge2020]

Not sure what the stance being argued is. Should we require companies run morality polls and submit a pre-rollout court to determine the legality of new products that push the limits of human innovation?

Also, it's important to note that humans are actually quite bad at this sort of judgement. I'm sure if you showed everyone in Germany in 1980 a computer, and how it can instantly store and retrieve files and documents, and asked them 'is this moral?' they would be against it on the grounds that it would put hundreds of office workers out of a job.

[bigDinosaur]

Great. Now what's your policy proposal?

[safety1st]

That's not exactly how things work, though. Laws aren't deterministic like a computer program. They can be drafted broadly, poorly, incompletely, or simply not take into account things that didn't exist when the law was written.

It's the job of the judiciary to interpret the laws in these situations, and part of that is looking at the spirit of the law and create case law which may alter the powers of government.

This is very much part of the Western tradition of common law, as is a vigorous discussion over how far the judiciary should be able to go. It's fair to say popular sentiment has drifted in a libertine direction over the last 50 years, but the debate is far from settled.

(In fact we can speculate with some reliability about what the future may hold: via one mechanism or another, including the judiciary, governments usually trend more libertine in times of peace and more authoritarian in times of crisis.)

[bjornsing]

I don’t think you can equate common law and Western tradition. Large parts of what I would call The Western world has the civil law system.

[safety1st]

Yes you're right - just meant to say that common law is one of the major Western legal traditions, and worded it awkwardly

[darkwater]

> They can be drafted broadly, poorly, incompletely, or simply not take into account things that didn't exist when the law was written.

Computer programs suffer all of this as well :)

[abigail95]

common law is very much the minority of western law traditions

[omginternets]

That’s definitely not how French law works. What is not proscribed is permitted.