Navigating the Law
10th April 2022
When I was in college I took a business law class. (I needed an elective and it was in a time slot I could attend.) One of the things I learned about was the “reasonably prudent person” standard. Oversimplified, it states the law should be based upon how reasonable person would have acted or what that person would have foreseen. Boiled down, it holds that a normal person should be able to understand the law. At least that is how my instructor (who was a lawyer and an engineer) explained it to the class. Mind, this was back in the 1970s. Things seemed to have changed since then.
The law has grown so complex the reasonably prudent person now needs an army of specialists to navigate through the tangle that the law has become today: lawyers, accountants, medical benefits advisors, financial advisors. This is good for specialists (especially lawyers) who add little value to society when the rules are simple enough to allow average people to live their lives without requiring specialists to navigate the laws. It is not good for society as a whole, especially if that society has a representative government. The need for specialists to interpret the rules reduces productivity and encourages rent-seeking. An increasing fraction of the economy goes into overhead, while activities that add wealth shrink.
There was a mxim of the Common Law that ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’, but that arose in a time when the law was merely what a sensible person knew to do and not do. Nowadays, ignorance of the law certianly ought to be an excuse.