For example, people have started using YouTube to tell their stories (good) but it also opens the door to malicious slander. What's the appropriate punishment?
A woman impersonated a teenage guy on MySpace to get to know a neighborhood girl. The "guy" then harshly romantically rejected the girl who struggled with chronic depression. She shortly thereafter committed suicide. Reports state the woman was recently charged under Federal laws for hacking because she lied about her identity on MySpace after local officials couldn't find any applicable law to charge her. (No claim made that news/internet reports represent the truth, or even a vague facsimile of it.) What is justice here?
Hebrew law is mostly case-law:
"When you build a new house, make a parapet around your roof so that you may not bring the guilt of bloodshed on your house if someone falls from the roof." [Deut. 22:8]And then it was up to the judge to determine if the law applied to a particular case. In America, that same law would be epic novel.
- What qualifies as a house?
- What if I build an office building?
- Or a doghouse?
- Or a tree house?
- Does the law apply if I build a swimming pool? If the swimming pool is on the roof, does it need a parapet around it, or does the law only apply to death by falling?
- Am I required to build a parapet if I buy a house without one?
- Am I guilty if I build a 1' parapet and someone falls off?
- What I don't child-proof my parapet and then a child squeezes through and dies?
- I view justice as "Was the law correctly applied?" (e.g. innocent people not imprisoned) rather "What is a just punishment for the crime?"
- Material injustice (theft, vandalism) is much easier to settle than emotional injustice. Many of the troubling cases involve emotional injustice, not material injustice.
- I ought to study the Hebrew laws again. Especially that long list in Leviticus that I usually fall asleep on.
2 comments:
Good post Al. I think most of us have our own justice system, which is based almost completely on what makes us the most comfortable with little regard for actual law.
Liberal, Conservative, etc. all of us have our own screwed up idea of justice. When you try and look, compare, and expect God's justice in a specific equation things get even more messed up because we are not living in a Kingdom in which he actively Governs... We are called to obey the leadership that has been set up for us, and unfortunately they are human just like those who allegedly commit crimes.
The Internet is a great tool and a merciless weapon. Without massive concession of personal freedoms there can be no effective laws on which it operates.
Alan, Alan, Alan...
In America, you don't need a legal treatise to provide the answers to your questions about the parapet. Even if you do everything right, you're still going to get sued, at which point you'll have no choice but to settle in order to avoid the costs and complexities of litigation. :)
With God, I figure we're stuck in Mandatory Binding Arbitration anyway, so I've pretty much given up on following the case law. Being God and all, can't he just decide not to follow the rules?
Speaking of which, I heard that you got engaged. I have no idea if/when you ended up getting married, so I'll just pass along my best wishes for whatever it is that's going on. :)
Did you follow the story about the divorcee who chronicled the nasty tactics employed by her wealthy husband and his lawyer on Youtube? Two weeks ago, I got asked to draft what has been affectionately dubbed the "youtube" clause for someone's prenup.
I'll see if I can wrangle permission to post it here. It's pretty hard to take a legal document seriously when it specifies the consequences for posting something to myspace. :)
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