Ignorance of the Law

An IllAdvised Opinion on Ignorance

May 05, 2023

Let me tell you a story. Suppose a new family were to come to town. One of the family is a boy in seventh grade. He goes to school on his first day and has Miss Crump for third-period English.

He comes to class, and she introduces him, and then she says that they will be doing creative writing in class today, everyone please get out your notebook and pen.

Our student likes creative writing, and the story prompt that Miss Crump wrote on the board, “Imagine that you are an alien coming to our school” actually gives him something he can relate to. So forty-five minutes later, he turns in his paper feeling kind of good about third period… altho he isn’t looking forward to PE, which comes next.

But then he sees Miss Crump frown. “Charles!” She says, for that is our hero’s name, “Charles, we do NOT write in black pen in this class. I clearly announced, on the first day of class, that we are ONLY to use BLUE pen in my class!” And she marks a large F (in red pen) on the front of his paper.

Now let us be clear, it is really the rule. She really did clearly announce, on the first day, that her class was to be ‘blue pen only’. And that the penalty for writing an assignment in black (or red, or green, or purple or… one girl actually did this once and Miss Crump nearly had to be taken to the hospital… pink) was to receive an F on the paper.

Here our hero Charles would argue, and few would disagree with him, that ignorance of the law was surely an excuse! That, having come in the middle of the semester, he couldn’t be expected to know all of Miss Crump’s foibles.

When we say ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’ we are repeating one of the most nonsensical statements ever made in the human language.

Now, there is a ground for the statement. It is bad ground. It is marshy ground. It is poorly tilled and deceptive ground, but there is ground.

What is actually meant when we say this is that you can’t actually be ignorant of the law. We imagine in our heads that someone murdered a little old lady on the street with a butter knife, and imagine him pleading in court that he didn’t know it was against the law to use a butter knife to murder little old ladies.

But if we think for more than one second about what we are saying here, it is not ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’ but ‘It is not possible to be ignorant of this law’. IOW we assume that all human beings, or at least properly raised human beings, have an inbuilt knowledge of right and wrong behaviour, and so can be justly punished when they step out of bounds.

Or we may actually be saying, “Well, yes, you didn’t know, and tough luck to you, but by publicly punishing you we will, in fact, be putting you and everyone else on notice that is against the law.”

Or we may actually be saying, “Well, yes, you didn’t know, and tough luck to you, but our police department needs a new cruiser.”

But what I do not believe anyone could possibly be saying is “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.” I do not believe anyone in the right mind (leaving behind the butter knife wielder) is actually saying is “You have no lessened moral culpability for breaking a law that you did not know existed.” It is the essence of the very nature of moral culpability that one must be violating a standard that one knew, or should have known, existed.

So we need to add, “Or should have known”. We need to add that what many people might well mean when they say ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’ is that there exists a moral obligation, when getting ready to engage in some activity, to do adequate research into that activity to ensure oneself that one knows all of the laws relevant to this activity.

But then surely one must add ‘in this case’ to our maxim. It must read ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse in this case’. And surely we must reserve it for cases where we are acting in an extraordinary capacity. If one is going to shoot a human being out of a cannon across several busy city streets and have him land in a barrel of honey then, yes, one can see where one might need to consult (and inform) several authorities (and make sure one’s liability insurance is paid up).

But if we are walking down the sidewalk in Podunk Vermont, and we stop to wave at some baby geese, we cannot be legitimately be hauled off to the clinker for a thirty year stretch because the town council passed a ‘no waving at baby geese’ ordinance last week!

No. The actual rule of justice is ‘Ignorance of the law is a perfect excuse’; and the burden of proof must be on the justice system to prove that the law that they are executing must be either so obvious that it was not possible for anyone to be ignorant of it, or that the activity that they were engaging in was so outside of the normal that any reasonable person would have known that they had to look up the specific rules. IOW that they weren’t ignorant of the law… they knew they should have looked it up and didn’t.

But our poor student shouldn’t get an F. He should be informed of Miss Crump’s rule and get a normal grade… until next time. (Now, the girl that wrote in Pink, she should be be expelled! There really is not excuse for that!)

Von’s Substack

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Ignorance of the Law

An IllAdvised Opinion on Ignorance

Links

See, It's Just a Game: Justice isn’t important to the Justice System

Banana Republic: The misuse of the law by the rich and powerful

Trial by Jury

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