While the UK courts have given themselves the power to perform judicial review, there is no constitutional basis for this review and so the courts are reluctant to step on Parliament's toes because if they go too far they risk Parliament deciding that it doesn't like the courts' interference and removing their authority. This isn't a hypothetical and the courts have at times resorted to some crazy mental gymnastics to evade Parliament's attempts to prevent judicial review.

The US has a similar concept that enables federal agencies to make regulations on Congress's behalf but it's much more limited in scope due to the separation of powers and more solid position of the US Supreme Court.

The latter system is what happens if you actually have rule of law. The law says X is illegal, you did not do X, therefore you cannot be prosecuted. Meanwhile anyone caught doing X is prosecuted or it's a scandal that they're seen getting away with it.

The former is autocracy in a trench coat. Whether you're in violation of the law is irrelevant because the laws are so numerous and ambiguous that everyone is always in violation of the law and the only thing that matters is if the prosecutors want to charge you.

Sadly the US is moving more towards the "traditional" system rather than the other way around.

The law it seems already covers Wikipedia. Ofcom are choosing not to enforce. I interpret the watchlist comments as ofcom setting up a defensible position for themselves.

Yes the law is probably wrong to include Wikipedia, but the enforcers of the law seem to have common sense. Which overall seems to be a win.

"Tolls are a ratchet - they only move in one direction."

...and none of this has anything to do with Prince Andrew et al (because that's in real-life, not on the Internet).

It's the exact same process that lead to the 2010s IWF/Cleanfeed/Wikipedia block over controversial 1970s music album art.

It's idiocy and fear of a rabid public, not a conspiracy.

The US is moving in various ways, true, but certainly I think the diminishing of Chevron deference is a move towards clearer law. Agency actors have always acted in a capricious way but they’re now far more susceptible to capture than in prior eras (or at least it’s much more visible) so reducing their power offers more transparency.

Three Felonies a Day

" Silverglate’s book first explains how law should work, and then demonstrates how federal law really works as he weaves through dozens of cases showing clear prosecutorial abuse. An ugly, recurrent feature is that prosecutors often manipulate the media. "

https://fee.org/articles/three-felonies-a-day-how-the-feds-t...

"For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law."

We have a story in the news currently about a foreign child gang rape leader (yes, those are things in the UK) who raped at least 30 children and was released early after serving just 14 years in prison.

We have major children sexual abuse scandals in this country basically every year too. Politicians never care about that though.

This situation currently describes the USA.

They know full well that if a successful legal challenge forced them to weaken parts of the OSA by removing service categories from scope, that they'd effectively open the floodgates to more challenges over other categories. The government and Ofcom don't want their precious work ripped up and the courts seemingly don't want to be responsible for doing so.

Whatever loophole they've found, it is practically a certainty that it will be addressed in the future.

One funny thing in California that is relevant is lane splitting. It is legal but guidelines are decided on by the CHP (state police). In practice, this means they have discretion to pull you over.

I must imagine this is like the creation of Shadow IT in organizations. In the past, when you made it hard to get a server or whatever, you’d end up with your org building their software somewhere else where IT can’t see it.

This must be the legal innovation that matches that: if law is hard to pass, shove a bunch of things off into Shadow Legislative which can then change rules on a whim.

It’s essentially a mechanism to re-enable rapid decision making in a sclerotic system. So perhaps the US using it less than the Old World is simply an artifact of age (though extant nations vary, the legal traditions of the Old World seem to have endured) and in time we will see it dominate the US as well.

48/56 of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were born in the 13 colonies, and I think for a lot of them what they hated about the way the system worked is that they weren't fully part of it. ("No taxation without representation")

early release is not a problem by itself. honestly the best way to reform the criminal justice system would be replacing fixed prison terms with release based on a psych evaluation and completed volunteer work. of course when you need to release offenders for capacity you should start with the least dangerous ones and i dont think thats happening here, its just random or going off time served.

You have discovered politics

I'm not convinced, as the people who designed the US system had extensive exchanges with the ones who ended up designing the modern French one, which became the basis for most of the rest of Europe (bar the UK).

The US and continental European systems were both designed in concert and in opposition to how the old European monarchies worked.

But was the reason they left the legal tradition? In this telling of the story, they were fully aware of the legal tradition being the reason for their unhappiness. But is it true?

I know the original immigrants/colonists were looking for a specific kind of religious freedom they couldn't have, but you must be speaking of the later waves (which are the majority of people).

I remember ages ago reading this paper (PDF warning): https://annesofiebeckknudsen.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/...

It made the case that (simplifying) individualists left for the US while collectivists stayed. And because of the massive scale of the migration relative to the populations, this meant that the two regions were permanently altered. Cool, eh?

But I don't know if the thesis has been supported by alternative tests. Essentially, it's what I feel is true, but I've felt many things are true and been wrong many times!

It does also have situations where people go "Hey, this toll bridge was built 50 years ago, surely the tolls should be abolished" and the people who built the bridge are like "Nope. See, here's the press about it 50 years ago saying what a great idea it is to have the tolls be slightly lower but perpetual". Feel free to build a time machine and go tell your past selves that's not a great idea after all.

But well, nothing is forever. In five hundred years that perpetual toll on a road is obsolete because hardly anybody owns a private vehicle so the toll mostly just moves (local) government money from one pile (funding transport) to another (build infrastructure) and it's not a very efficient way to do that. Or the bridge falls down and its replacement doesn't have a toll because people were sick of tolls. Nothing is forever.

Don't know the exact details about the US, but if you look at how the some EU countries and the EU is run today, it really isn't that much different than European monarchies of old in practice, even if on paper it's different.

Like, you have nobles from the ancient von der Leyen German noble family appointed to leadership positions by falling upwards via no direct election by the people, enforcing unpopular laws like chat control, that were rejected 3 times, by calling an emergency election during summer time when opposition was on vacation. And if you vocally criticize the nobility online too much, they'll ban your content on social media for some BS reason at best, or send police to your house with court orders to intimidate you at worst.

This isn't in opposition to monarchies, we just replaced monarchies with another form of power structure that has the same goal: keep the peasants quiet, obedient and paying taxes. There's a reason history keeps repeating itself: A fish coming from water will only know water.

That being said, the toll roads keep expanding so that they can continue to be operated by the private company that built them.

This is an arrangement the state government is quite happy with, because they do not have to budget for the maintenance of those roads and they are able to collect taxes on the revenue collected by the toll authority. Converting those toll roads would cause a spike in expenditures and a drop in tax revenue.

Therefore, there is a perverse incentive on both sides to keep the toll roads from being converted into public ones.

I have no idea if this sort of thing was prevalent in the past, especially in the UK. But I wanted to chime in about why several toll roads that were supposed to be paid off thirty years ago are still going strong. I suspect that 500+ years ago “build toll road, hand toll road to the public” was a lot more straightforward.

The ones who landed at Plymouth Rock were, sort of, but I'm not sure how representative they were of the time.

As an example, here’s a post on /r/sanfrancisco https://old.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/1uvebed/block...

You’ll see that a large number of people believe that while the letter of the law is violated, it’s not a big deal. I’m sure that applies all the way to the top.

Surely the way that parliament says the court is wrong is to re-legislate. They can't just have a vote and say "that interpretation is wrong" if, for example, the Supreme Court rejects their interpretation.

If the letter of the law doesn't enforce the spirit of the law, it was poorly written or it's out of date and needs to be amended.

In theory, the US system allows for those updates. In reality it's a little less clear. Currently we're absolutely moving to the fealty to the crown system and it's not great.

Any system that makes specific carve outs for anyone to not follow the letter of the law is not about enforcing the law, it's about maintaining control using arbitrary enforcement and chronyism (not sure of that spelling).

The system of workarounds for religious customs has always fascinated me. I will follow the letter of the law, because I have to. If I don't agree with the laws, I can move. If I was in a faith tradition and finding workarounds for the intent of the law, I would choose a different faith. To me it's very binary; either you are or you aren't [Religion]. Using technicalities on your deity just feels like a suckers game to make your current and any possible afterlife worse. Like God is just going to say, "oh man you really got one over on me." Makes zero sense.

The correct way to deal with this is to make the law do what people actually want. It's entirely possible to draft a law where actually blocking the sidewalk is a violation but the nose of a car extending into it by a few inches isn't considered blocked. And the way to get that law is to enforce the existing law so that the people who don't like it will have it changed instead of having a law that everybody is violating but only the disfavored have it enforced against them.

So it's true that one level of depth is "enforce the law and unjust laws will be repealed", but the second level is "people prefer to not enforce the law" and "people decide the government" so it's meta-structures that determine outcomes here. As an example, some kinds of laws are more effective than others.

The CIA Sabotage Manual offers some techniques to introduce stalling and sabotage good organization function but it seems like the opposite is a currently-unsolved problem.

The thing about "people" is that they're us. If we don't want a capricious autocracy then we have to make different choices.

> The CIA Sabotage Manual offers some techniques to introduce stalling and sabotage good organization function but it seems like the opposite is a currently-unsolved problem.

The reason those techniques work is precisely because people pretend to have rule of law while in practice facilitating tyranny and office politics. The sabotage operates by playing into the hypocrisy and demanding that all of the stupid rules people have been ignoring actually be implemented. The way to prevent it is to reform the rules, but that isn't in the interest of the people using vague/unreasonable rules to their own advantage, so actually reforming them encounters resistance and takes time and in the meantime you can keep using them to throw sand in the gears.

Notice how poorly that would work in both a formal authoritarian dictatorship and system with true rule of law. In the dictatorship the dictator does whatever they want and you can't make them do or not do anything by pointing to rules. In a system with rule of law, the rules are already being followed so that stupid/unreasonable rules are reformed as they're encountered and you can't use the massive backlog of them to make everything grind to a halt while people scramble to do all at once the thing they should have been doing continuously over time.

It's somewhat unconvincing to me, and likely many others, that rules with force should be instantaneously created but cannot be instantaneously revoked. I think the two go together. If deference is congressional intent, congress can explicitly delegate to an agency. If Chevron Deference is congressional intent, congress can explicitly set that to be the default.

0: to use the terms you use, and not because I agree

1: as perhaps the current understanding of the Commerce Clause should as well

I think if you rewrite that to, “If the letter of the law is demonstrably out of sync with the public sense of the spirit of the law, then it should be amended,” I’m with you.

But I think that’s not what you meant? If you meant “the letter of the law should define prescribed and proscribed behavior exactly,” then I think that’s impossible.

There will always be exceptions, and no set of rules can be exhaustive. The system should allow for humans to recognize that fact.

> In a system with rule of law, the rules are already being followed so that stupid/unreasonable rules are reformed as they're encountered and you can't use the massive backlog of them to make everything grind to a halt while people scramble to do all at once the thing they should have been doing continuously over time.