A year back someone noticed that there’s a sliver of land outside Lakla that’s technically in the jurisdiction of neither of the districts that border it, because of a surveying thing. There was a cheesy headline about ‘murder is legal at these coordinates’. But, you know, since Anitam has its fucking head on straight unlike Voa, if you actually murdered someone in that location and then really sincerely explained that you’d looked at the laws and it was totally legal there, the court would not go ‘oops, our bad, have a nice day’, they would hang you.
Like, a thing about laws is that it’s nearly impossible to write them without loopholes. You want consistent and predictable enforcement, but the consistent and predictable should be on the level of ‘if you cheat people out of more than 100k, you die, even if you found loopholes to defend it’, not on the level of ‘suicidal rigidity about not arresting people who interpret the law in their own favor’
because, like, lots of murderers sincerely think it was self-defense and lots of pyramid scheme managers sincerely think it was just a business operation that got a bit out of hand. And judges aren’t supposed to be mindreaders. Their job is to decide if you murdered someone, not if you knew that the thing you did counted. if anything, making the law about whether you reasonably understand yourself to have broken the law makes it less predictable and consistent, because instead of ‘if you do violence to someone who isn’t presently trying to kill you and they die, you die’ it becomes, well, the current insanity, where it matters whether you interpreted the law as permitting the thing you did.
