Because there’s nothing automatic about our law passing process. How many years is the right amount to strike an old law from the books? You wouldn’t want something like the abolishment of slavery to ever become automatically unenforceable. So now you need someone to decide on a case by case basis which laws should still be on the books… well, that’s what the Supreme Court is for. They don’t reconsider every law, though. It seems to be at their discretion.
Comment on Trump’s Allies Say They’ll Enforce the Comstock Act. Believe Them.
PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 5 months agoNo I mean why isn’t striking them from the books just an automatic part of a judicial ruling of law passing that renders them unenforceable?
Pandemanium@lemm.ee 4 months ago
baltakatei@sopuli.xyz 4 months ago
Laws on the books made invalid by precedent do create ambiguity. Ambiguity is problematic because it introduces an element of unpredictability to a system. The US legal system, with its Common Law tradition, deals with that ambiguity with the doctrine of stare decisis. (Latin: Stare decisis et non quieta movere: “to stand by decisions and not disturb the undisturbed”) which says similar court cases should be treated similarly unless a higher court determines that the precedent was wrongly decided or societal changes warrant a different interpretation. The Comstock Laws (i.e. Comstock Act of 1873) generally prohibit sending any material or literature useful for or promoting contraceptives, abortion, or pornography. Over time, various Supreme Court cases have affected the applicability of these prohibitions, but have not eliminated them completely:
- Griswold v. Connecticut (1965): Married couples can use contraceptives from an expectation of marital privacy.
- Stanley v. Georgia (1969): Possessing obscene materials is not a crime in itself.
- Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972): Unmarried couples can use contraceptives from an expectation of privacy.
- Roe v. Wade (1973): Women have a right to have an abortion.
- Miller v. California (1973): Local communities may define what is acceptably lewd.
- Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992): States may indirectly deny women abortions through inconvenience.
- Lawrence v. Texas (2003): Consenting adults have privacy as far as sex between them is concerned.
- Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022): Roe v. Wade overturned. Women no longer have a federal right to an abortion.
The Comstock Act of 1873, despite being mostly narrowed over time by the above cases, has been recently applied. For example, in Texas, punishment from USC 1462 (“Importation or transportation of obscene matters”) was applied in a 2022 child pornography case in the context of sending obscene materials over the Internet. If enough Supreme Court justices decide to overturn the above cases, then the Comstock Laws could be mostly reinstated. However, the process would likely be extremely contentious and stall after enough people vote out the political faction pushing to make their lewds, contraceptives, and abortions illegal.
Basically, old laws are like legacy code; old libraries that are dependencies for many newer laws which require the version history of the entire stack to be interpreted properly. Yes, it is a baroque tangle, but until people lose faith in the judicial system and replace it in a revolution, society runs on it.
PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Bro I’m talking about a law put out of enforceability by a judicial ruling or a new law passing.
Why does that ruling or new law automatically remove the old law from the books?
Why was Arizona’s weird civil war era law still on the books after Roe completely made it illegal?
The_Che_Banana@beehaw.org 5 months ago
Because the ruling class is as lazy as it is ruthless
Infynis@midwest.social 5 months ago
Because our whole government is built around it being a given that the people working in the government want it to actually work. When they, in fact, do the opposite, there’s nothing in place to stop them
tyler@programming.dev 4 months ago
You’re not answering their question at all.