There is a school of thought in this country that holds no law exists until it has passed judicial review. It also holds that law can only be understood by the judiciary. The question becomes, is there any value in reading the law?
Is it required for everyone who attempts to obey the law to have an attorney's advice? If so, is there not something wrong with the law?
If it is in fact the case that no person can understand the law, then it is clear that writing laws in english is no more than a convenience to the lawmakers, lawyers and judges. It would not matter in the least to the average person if they were written in Sanskit or hieroglyphics.
That is no more extreme a statement than to say the ordinary citizen cannot understand the law by reading it. If a normal understanding of english is not sufficient to understand the law then what does it matter what language it is written in?
When there are laws that have the government as a potential adversary where there are penalties of fines and imprisonment it is not clear that one can avoid the violation of such laws without an attorney, several of them, for every action.
If the laws are not to be written clearly such that the average person can understand them, how can the average person be held guilty of violating them? If it is possible to hold people responsible for what they can not understand then there is no compelling reason for laws to be made public. There is no clear difference between a secret law and a public law which can not be understood.
Rather there are several pretensions that need be addressed. The first is clearly that a person can be held accountable for an incomprehensible law. It goes further than ignorance of the law not being an excuse. It means that careful reading of the law and attempting to comply with it is not an excuse.
The second is that law can only be understood in terms of the court decisions regarding it. This requires every person following every court decision to a degree that no law firm in the country can. And after that, understanding it in the way a judge will understand it.
No where are these more clear than in multi-judge appeals courts and even to the Supreme Court. Whenever there is a split decision, the law is not clear enough even for judges to understand.
This cult of laws appears to be a form of both legislative and judicial tyranny with of course the complicity of the executive branch which says, "don't worry about the law, we'll tell you when you break it." Of course you can subscribe to the Federal Register to read what the Executive Branch experts think the law is. It is not as though the three branches agree.
Here we are as free citizens living in a system of laws not of men when the official government position is that laws can be written such that we can not understand and that even it can not agree as to their meaning. Of what value the claim that we are blessed by the rule of law when the law might as well be written in Egyptian heiroglyphs so far as how they rule us is concerned?
It is not clear that there is justice in a legal system which holds that four Supreme Court justices can agree with a man and yet that man can be guilty of the crime at the same time. If four of the nine best legal minds in the country agree with a man then what has he done but made an error in judgment? If the Supreme Court justices are not the best legal minds in the country that is a different and perhaps an equally serious problem.
There was never a time when laws could have been considered simple as the mystique of law has been preserved wherever lawyers have flourished. There is no appeal to the complexity of modern society to explain the complexity of law. More laws, certainly, but not the complexity of law.
The other side of this is the idea that laws with the government will say do not apply to normal activities read as though they do. At the least is causes paranoia. At the worst it is like the RICO laws which have been applied to everyone but those the government assured us they would only apply to, organized crime.
And there is another problem. The law that is passed bears no relationship the what is enforced under the law that is comprehensible to the people affected by the law.
We are left with many questions. What is the value of a rule of law to those who can not comprehend it? How is it possible to obey laws which can not be comprehended? But what moral force can laws which can not be understood be enforced?
And more importantly why should anyone even attempt to comply with any law when its meaning is occult knowledge about which even the keepers of the secret knowledge disagree?