The Report has no authority from a legal standpoint--it's only a comment on the document, admittedly by an important person.
Perhaps you would benefit from studying the history of the ratification of the Constitution. There is a tendency for those unfamiliar with the history to treat Constitutional law matters as if they were Contract Law matters ("Oh well, you signed it ("ratified it"), so you're bound by it whether it makes sense or not"). It doesn't even work that way in Contract Law!
There was considerable disagreement over accepting the Constitution. Two states refused to do so outright. In other states, promises were made by men of honor, such as the aforementioned James Madison, that a Bill of Rights would be added. The "ratification" was not in any real way binding upon the states. They knew perfectly well that if the promises made did not come to pass it was neither militarily nor politically feasible (at that time) to force any state to join or remain in the Union.
The "legal authority" of the Constitution, as such, must be considered both a) tentative, and b) overridden by the Bill of Rights (also primarily written by James Madison).
As Madison wrote the Bill of Rights to be an open-ended document (that's what's meant by "rights retained by the people" - 9th Amendment - and "rights reserved to the people" - 10th Amendment), his words certainly can and do carry legal weight as they give us a starting point for fleshing out those unspecified rights.
True, but recording studios have complex requirements that may not be applicable here. Sound attenuation through materials is a function of frequency and thickness, and bass, for example, is a lot harder to block than higher frequencies. The (more or less) higher frequencies associated with human voice might not be as hard to block.
I can't tell from your post whether the noise is coming from rooms to the side of you, or above, or through the door, or through the windows, or even reflecting off a hard floor.
If it's mostly coming from one wall, you might have an option. Would they let you put some portable insulation against a wall? You can get some 1 inch thick 4'x8' rigid foam sheets at the bigger hardware stores for about $10, and possibly tape these together against the wall (or use furniture to hold them up). It wouldn't be perfect, but it might help block some of the noise, and you could take these with you when you leave.
A person looking to "get fit" needs to think about what it really means to "be fit". There is far more to being fit than just muscle strength or aerobic fitness (both of which are necessary, but not sufficient). To be truly fit individual, you also need to work on balance, coordination, and flexibility (all of which tend to be extremely poor for most people in today's world -- especially us nerds -- typically the result of accumulated bad habits, lack of good education, and neglect).
It is not just the physical muscles that atrophy over time in the presence of neglect, it is also the control and coordination of those muscles (or, the ability of the brain to drive the nervous system to use the muscles) that atrophies. Strength building activities that isolate muscles, and simple, repetitive aerobic fitness movements will not fully restore this lost control, let alone increase it over time. There is a world of difference between how a highly trained dancer or martial artist moves and uses their body, even in everyday life and outside the scope of these hobbies, versus an ordinary person that limits themselves to just lifting weights / running / biking / hiking / etc. Truly being fit requires reversing both types of atrophy.
Working on coordination of muscles also tends to help people learn to be more physically relaxed, without having to first tire out their muscles to get them to relax. Most people I see in offices are carrying a LOT of unnecessary tension.
Yoga, Pilates, and Tai Chi are all potentially great for working on the more subtle aspects of physical fitness in the office, iff you have a good understanding of what you're trying to achieve. Good instruction is essential. Patience and a sense of humor help as well.
Typically you'll need to be selective in what and how you do in order to fit these activities into an office space (and to be able to do these in office clothing).
In addition to a variety of Internet sources of information on this stuff, there are also a number of good books and dvds that can help you with this. Try looking up "office yoga", or look up the word "chair" paired with one of the following: "yoga", or "pilates", "tai chi", or even "exercise".
Another good option is to get an inflatable balance ball or a balance platform. Many exercises that can be done standing can also be done while balancing, with some care. Safety first!
More to the point, if the treaty invalidates the Bill of Rights, an open-ended document due to the presence of the 9th Amendment, the treaty would not be valid in the first place. At least some applications of unlocking phones would have to be considered an exercise of reasonable conduct rights arising under the 9th Amendment.
We know from history that treaties can not infringe fundamental rights. Consider the following:
Two states refused to ratify the original Constitution. Other states only ratified after men of honor such as James Madison, whose promises were trusted, promised to add a Bill of Rights. All of the states knew that they could withdraw at any time, should these promises not come to fruition, as it was neither militarily nor politically feasible (at that time) to force any state to be part of the Union.
If these states were prepared to trust the authority of the federal government, including the authority granted by the treaty power, then there would have been no need for a Bill of Rights. However, the history shows that the states felt a strong need for a Bill of Rights, and hence they were not prepared to trust the federal government with the powers granted in the original Constitution.
This history clearly shows the authority of the Bill of Rights is intended to trump the powers granted in the earlier parts of the Constitution, including the treaty power.
Simple logic confirms this (essentially a proof by contradiction argument): if the treaty power could trump the Bill of Rights, then any right could be infringed merely by writing a treaty to do it, and no rights would exist. However, the Bill of Rights provides for the existence of rights (and in fact makes the list of possible rights open-ended), we have a contradiction, and the original assumption that the treaty power trumps the Bill of Rights is shown to be invalid.
It seems the only reason a lawyer would ever study the constitution is to find ways to subvert it.
If you do decide to study Constitutional law, I'd say you'll find the situation is not quite as bad as you suppose.
Not everyone that studies Constitutional law is practicing lawyer. We would be better off as a society if more non-lawyers became familiar with this area of law. Typical law textbooks are written at roughly the same level of difficulty as the easier social science or history textbooks. In other words, they're a lot easier to read than the average math, physics, engineering, or medical text books, which means the subject should be accessible to anyone reading Slashdot that wants to invest the time...
There have been many good decisions.
Thus, in many cases, lawyers have in fact used their knowledge of the Constitution to do actual good, surprising though this may seem.
There have also been many bad decisions.
The problem with many of the bad decisions is that they often don't seem that unreasonable, at first glance, or when examined in isolation. It's often the case that the bad decisions only pose a serious problem when one looks at the long term implications. Not everyone has enough knowledge of history or understanding of the world, to see the long term implications, and not everyone that does see these implications has the moral courage to recognize bad decisions as invalid.
The real problem with how lawyers study Constitutional law tends to flow from two facts 1) Lawyers make up the majority of the people that study Constitutional law, and 2) Legal professionals, as a class in society, are in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to the nature, scope, and form of the legal system.
As a consequence, this means most of those studying this area of law can be presumed to be "highly biased observers" (as a social scientist might put things).
There are many inconsistencies, problems, and even contradictions that exist within the legal system, and it seems plausible the legal community will never find it convenient to resolve these issues, because of this conflict of interest.
In turn, the excessive complexity, inconsistencies, and lack of coherence in the legal system makes it possible for government invasions of privacy and lots of other bad stuff to occur.
Or, putting this in nerd terms, the chaos, or entropy, in the legal system tends to increase over time so long as the only people studying, implementing, and working on changing that system are legal professionals (making it a closed system). We had a big infusion of energy from an outside source in the 60's, in the form of the "Civil Rights" movement, which worked to correct some of the problems. We're probably long due for another.
The really big problem with these kinds of things is the ethics issue, which, interestingly, didn't appear to get raised in this case. No rational society would expect murder investigations to pay for themselves: why are traffic violations treated any differently?
Perhaps the legal professionals involved didn't want to encourage anybody to be taking too close a look at ethics, given how many problems the U.S. legal system has with respect to this.
If the money for a traffic ticket goes into the budget of the issuing government in any way, shape, or form, that inherently creates an ethical conflict of interest with respect to the issuing of tickets. In such circumstances, we do not and can not know whether tickets are being issued as a legitimate exercise of government authority, or rather because the ticket provides income to pay the salary of the issuing officer, or perhaps to provide money for the officer's political superiors to pay for projects that get them re-elected (which in turn gives the officer an incentive to write the ticket in order to get raises, promotions, and other benefits that those superiors can provide). This inability to perceive whether the government is acting legitimately creates contempt for the government on the part of the public and that in turn leads to lots of negative consequences for a society.
No legitimate government should be engaging in such practices. The right to ethical conduct on the part of government is a fundamental human right, and even the appearance of conflict of interest must be avoided whenever possible. Hence, any money that a government gets in the form of tickets needs to be dispersed in a manner that is consistent with ethics. It can not, for example, become part of the government's budget. It might be permissible to give that money to some worthy cause in a land far away (even here, we would have to have appropriate limits on how this is done).
In this particular case, I would assert the right to ethical government and ethical legal practice to be a fundamental right arising under the 9th Amendment, and thus this government is not just violating the due process part of the US Constitution, but a more fundamental right.
Advertising is societal corrosion. It eats away at our experiences, it reshapes our thoughts, it homogenizes and neuters our culture, and it's all because people such as yourself see "not making any money" as an inherent problem with all sorts of aspects of our lives.
Another problem with advertising: it violates what should be a fundamental human right, namely the right to not be forced to be part of an audience. Just as the freedom to wave one's fist around can be constrained when that fist goes into another person's private space, so should the freedom to publish (i.e. rights such as freedom of the press, freedom of speech) be constrained when it intrudes into another person's life.
Or, in other words, one is not living in a free country if one is coerced into watching, seeing, or hearing advertising.
some ideals are timeless and beyond debate. life liberty freedom from oppression those are the core ideals
You (and the Founding Fathers) missed a core ideal: ethical government (and ethical law). The absence of this in so many current legal and governmental matters is a major factor why the others are being eroded.
So as society progresses slavery might be a good idea again.
Many of the Founding Fathers were strongly opposed to slavery. Ben Franklin, for example, stated that the American Revolution was necessary due to the resistance on the part of the British Government against ending slavery.
Ironic, given how things turned out. Or, perhaps, it would be better to say that then, like now, entrenched corruption won out over principles.
If you study constitutional law, you'll find that changes to the Constitution have been happening almost since the beginning of the country (and that's NOT counting the official amendments).
Unfortunately, many of these changes are "under the radar" of the average person, who is likely to believe (as I have had people tell me) that Constitutional Law has no relevance to them.
I share your skepticism about the likelihood that changes implemented by the current political system would be good. Neither of the two dominant political parties has much interest in reform, and neither does the legal profession.
It's interesting how the Bill of Rights prevents Congress from passing any law infringing freedom of speech, but yet one can be coerced into testifying before a court or before Congress.
Contradictions in the legal system inherently make it more complex and confusing to ordinary, which tends to create an artificial long term demand for the services of legal professionals. We can presume that the acceptance of the current federal rules on coerced testimony, rules that contradict the written text of the 1st Amendment, reflects unethical conduct on the part of the legal profession.
As the 1st Amendment can reasonably be regarded as being extended with respect to state and local governments by the 14th Amendment, we can also presume unethical conduct on the part of legal professionals who accept rules regarding coerced testimony at these levels.
It would be better to amend the Constitution to have explicit rules governing when the government can coerce testimony. This would both remove the contradiction, and make explicit what the rules actually are.
For example, if a person chooses to testify in a case, it should be possible to engage in a reasonable cross-examination: the Constitutional amendment could permit this.
It is not clear that there is any justification to force a person to testify, except under a limited set of circumstances. We might have a rule where persons can be coerced to testify regarding government service, while in government service or for five years afterwards, subject to reasonable compensation for their time, and also subject to reasonable limitation on scope (merely because a person works for the government does not necessarily authorize the government to engage in a massive violation of their privacy or other fundamental rights: a balance between individual rights and the needs of the public must always be struck).
Similarly, we might have a rule where we can require a person to testify when somebody else's life can reasonably be supposed to be in immediate danger, subject to the limitation that such testimony can not be held against them.
No legitimate government should be able to force a person to reveal a password for personal files.
For example, would you want a court system where juries were composed only of people who self-selected as volunteers for jury service? You did use the expression "time wasted" so perhaps this kind of thing isn't something you'd consider a waste of time, but in that case, where do you draw the line? And of course in a rather different example, the very premise of prison as a penalty is that it is the government deliberately wasting your time.
I like your suggestion about reasonable equality.
Unlike the case in the physical sciences, in general human matters we often do have to come up with ways to drawing lines without the luxury of precise or accurate measures. This is an unavoidable aspect of law. Recognizing this is realistic.
One possible rule that would follow from the right to not have one's time wasted would be a rule that prison time was a waste of a person's time if the person wasn't actually guilty of behavior that any reasonable society would consider wrongful.
Thus, for example, for those persons convicted of rape, who have been subsequently set free as a result of DNA evidence, their time was wasted and hence their right to not have their time wasted was violated. This in turn provides a justification for compensating those individuals for the time the state has stolen from their lives.
Your idea of providing compensation to those who are forced to take the time to defend themselves is very much consistent with the assertion of rights that recognize the time of individuals has value.
Jury service is an area of law that often fails to recognize the value of the time of individuals (aside from the legal professionals, the value of whose time is clearly being recognized by the system, at least here). It would not make sense to have people self selected for jury service, but we could have stronger rules limiting the ability of government to coerce people into jury service in order to make the policies regarding jury service more consistent with fundamental rights. For example, we might decide that if a person serves on a jury for x number of days (where "serves" includes the who selection process), then they are immune to jury service for x number of years. Similarly, if a person serves for y days, where y >> x, then they are immune to jury service for their rest of their lives.
We might also have stronger rules governing the cases that can be brought into court, and when a jury needs to see those cases, to make sure we aren't taking time away from people's lives without first having carefully thought about it.
Remember that you're talking about organizations that use "safety cameras" that are often paid for by the fines they generate, yet which would generate no money if they succeeded in their claimed goals of making drivers go more slowly, stopping people running red lights, etc. A large part of the automated traffic enforcement industry is built on fundamental conflicts of interest.
These conflicts of interest are exactly why there shouldn't be an automated traffic enforcement industry. Taxes can be used to pay for the police officers and associated equipment needed for a reasonable level of traffic enforcement. There is no need to have traffic enforcement pay for itself, any more than we need to have criminal investigation pay for itself. Competent, responsible governments will manage to balance their budgets without resorting to unethical practices.
It seems like this discussion is comparing apples and oranges.
Having some houses in Europe, even in Norway, that are very well insulated does not mean that all houses in Europe are equally well insulated. For less well insulated houses, house size would then become a factor.
I think you'd need to do some more research before you could justify concluding that the quality of insulation, rather than house size, determines the (purported) ability of Europeans to consume less energy.
To start with, are we sure we're measuring energy consumption correctly, and doing it in the same way for both populations? Are we comparing energy consumption of houses, or do commercial buildings get added into the mix? What about buildings that are both commercial and residential?
Further, without some more detailed data on where and how energy is being consumed, it is hard to compare the energy consumption of two groups of people and draw useful conclusions. For example, 1. Is most of the difference in energy consumption coming down to heating and cooling the house, or are there other high sources of energy consumption (perhaps different patterns of preparing food, or patterns of lighting usage) that affect the energy usage? 2. Is air conditioning, cleaning, and/or humidification (or dehumidification) used to the same extent in the two populations? 3. Are the population numbers in cold areas, or windy areas, or areas with both high heat and humidity, the same? For that matter, cold humid areas might results in different patterns of energy usage from dry humid areas. 4. Are the energy differences primarily associated with losses in people's houses, or with commercial buildings, or with inefficiencies in the generation and distribution of power?
Another possible complication would involve looking at fundamental building technology. Are there differences in the numbers of wood versus brick houses (or other structures) between Europe and the USA, and if so what impact does this have on the cost of insulation? What other environmental impacts do different housing technologies have? Are there differences in the ratio of newer to older houses between the two areas, and what impact does this have on energy consumed?
Another set of things to think about would be 1) how much energy is consumed to produce the technologies needed for high insulation, 2) how much energy is needed to transport and install these technologies, and 3) how much energy is needed to rebuild older houses to bring them up to modern standards. Also, 4) what energy costs are associated with legislation of high-insulation standards, the implementation of these standards, and the enforcement of them? Then, 5) what are the long term energy costs of maintaining the high-insulation technologies?
Further, energy costs are not the only consideration. It takes time and money to do things, so if we are spending time and money to "improve" the environment by improving the insulation of homes, what environmental problems are we forced to not work on because our supply of time and money is finite?
Are there subtle negative environmental impacts from the use of the more modern, high-insulation technologies, such as issues resulting from some aspects of the production, distribution, installation, and maintenance processes for these technologies?
We might also ask if there are negative environmental impacts, or other types of negative impact, such as negative impacts on a society, resulting from having smaller houses. Are there things people have to do differently, in the course of their lives, as a result of living in a smaller house that have a negative impact on the environment? Are more people living in shared houses or apartments in one society than the other, and what impact does this have on the society?
Finally, what subtle, long-term health impacts might result from long term exposure to closed environments, such as we find in extremely well insulated houses?
Unfortunately, the US legal system has been badly broken for a long time (some have argued that the system has been broken since the country was founded).
The problems with the patent and copyright systems aren't even the worst aspects of the problem, despite the massive popularity of discussions on those topics here on Slashdot. There are problems with many different aspects of the legal system, and some of these problems have far more negative impact on society (and on us nerds) than the broken patent and copyright laws.
Tort law is one of the particularly bad problem areas. It is not an accident that the USA is known as the "Land of the Lawsuit", or that there is a popular conception of lawyers as unethical jerks looking to abuse the system for their own gain (and at the expense of society). Rather, these things reflect a intuition that the public has that there is something fundamentally wrong in the legal system. Folks are starting to perceive that something is rotten in the state of law, so to speak, without really understanding the details.
For people who are in the right to effectively lose lawsuits because they can not afford to win them, or to effectively lose even when they "win", makes people scared of the legal system. Excessively complex laws, or contradictory laws, do the same. Scared people naturally look for somebody to protect them, and with respect to the legal system, the only ones that can provide protection are the legal professionals.
Thus, legal professionals, as a class in society, are in position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to many aspects of how lawsuits (and other legal matters) are handled. By choosing to handle these matters in a sloppy or incompetent manner, by making the legal system run in a glacially slow manner, by ignoring ethical conflicts of interest or fundamental rights, and by creating the perception that the legal system is complex, confusing, and scary, the legal profession creates long term business for itself.
This is not to say that all legal professionals are doing this. There are some good people in the profession. However, serious reform is needed, and it doesn't seem like there are enough good people in the profession for this to happen from within, which means it needs to be driven from outside the profession.
Most members of Congress, and many state legislators, are legal professionals, and these people are the ones that decide what the laws governing the legal profession will be. The bar associations, judges, and prosecutors also play a significant role in deciding how those laws work. Thus, almost everybody deciding what is or is not reasonable for legal professionals to do and what is or is not a reasonable part of the legal system is a legal professional.
This means the folks who write, interpret, and execute the laws governing the practice of law have a huge ethical conflict of interest with respect to exactly what appears in those laws.
In a sense, we have a group of foxes deciding for themselves under what circumstances a fox may be trusted to guard the hen-house.
There is nothing written into the Constitution or the Bill of Rights giving legal professionals this kind of power. In fact, it has been asserted that the right to have ethical conduct from legal professionals, having them avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest, arises under the 9th and 10th Amendments (rights retained by the people, and rights reserved to the people) and thus the current system can be considered to be contrary to the Bill of Rights.
Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that the legal profession has been fairly successful in keeping the average American from realizing just how many conflicts of interest and other problems involving their profession are buried in the legal system. For some strange reason, our professional press rarely seems to pick up on these issues, either.
I'd assert a right to not have one's time wasted by the government is a fundamental human right. The human lifespan, after all, is finite, and far too short for most of us. When a kidnapper or murderer steals a portion of a person's life, we consider that a wrongful act. For the government to steal a portion of a person's life should also be a wrongful act.
Thus, legal policies that permit one to be uncompensated are appropriately viewed as being in violation of a fundamental human right.
For the traffic offenses, can the UK national or local governments put the money for these fines into their budget? If the money goes ANYWHERE into the budget, that creates a major ethical conflict of interest, and I'd say not having government or the legal profession acting from a position of ethical conflict of interest would be another fundamental right.
For that matter, a policy of not compensating people for having to appear in court could be considered to represent ethical conflict of interest on the part of the legal profession (who presumably play a large role in determining such policies). After all, the more of a person's own time they potentially have to waste in court, the greater the demand for the services of a legal professional that could spend that time on one's behalf.
We paid for it. We should be able to see it, and profit from it.
There is not necessarily, however, a need to see it and profit from it immediately.
A long term right of public oversight over government can be asserted as a fundamental human right in a free country. Exactly what constitutes "long term" would vary from situation to situation, but for many things meaningful oversight should reasonably be able to happen within a few years of events.
In the USA, a fundamental right such as this can be asserted under the 9th Amendment ("rights retained by the people") and the 10th Amendment ("rights reserved to the people").
As such, to the extent that current US copyright law allows publishers to keep control over publicly funded research publications for extended periods of time, that law exists in violation of fundamental rights and is unconstitutional.
The correct long-term solution to this problem is not to worry about the prestige of open-source journals, which will doubtless appear in some fields on their own, and may even supersede the existing journals, but rather to change the current copyright law. As the current copyright law violates the Bill of Rights, any treaty provisions that would prevent such changes are rendered null and void.
The vast majority of research publications (those that receive any public funding, even so much as one dollar) should be made available to the public, free of charge, in an open, easily searchable and usable format, within 1 to 5 years after publication. Making this happen is part of the responsibility that researchers accept in return for the public support they receive.
Having a delay like this between initial publication and making things freely available allows publishers a chance to make reasonable profits, which in turn allows for pre-publication peer review and editing. These processes, while far from perfect, both have considerable value to society, as most writers have difficulty assessing their own work.
You're dancing around the most important thing we need: legal ethics reform.
Legal professionals are in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to the nature, scope, and form of the legal system. Over the long term this conflict of interest has created many problems within the US legal system, the broken patent and copyright laws being just two of the more obvious ones.
This is not to say that all lawyers are unethical. There are some highly ethical lawyers, but it appears they are badly outnumbered.
Take care of legal ethics reform, and software patent reform will become a real possibility. Ignore the legal ethics issues and 1) you'll never get patent reform, and 2) "loser pays" will be abused just as badly as the current system.
The proposed law seems like yet another attempt to side-step the core problem. Not surprising, considering that most legislators are legal professionals (and also considering that the American Bar Association is the most powerful lobbying group in the country), but not where we need to be going as a society.
Someone volunteering to join the military also agrees to be bound by the UCMJ.
It's not that simple. This isn't really a question of contract law, despite the presence of a contract when one joins the military.
The ability of Congress to create laws to govern the military are subject to fundamental rights, as are any powers of Congress. Some of the fundamental rights that apply to civilians can reasonably be lost or limited in military service. However, to the extent that the UCMJ infringes fundamental rights that reasonably should be retained by persons in military service, the UCMJ becomes illegal and unconstitutional.
It is worth remembering that members of the German military in WW2 were required by law to obey orders passed by their superior officers. At Nuremberg it was established that not all laws passed by governments are valid. The UCMJ is a set of laws, no more, no less.
As the Bill of Rights is open-ended (the 9th Amendment provides for rights "retained by the people" and the 10th Amendment provides for rights "reserved to the people"), determining what rights can reasonably be taken away from members of the military is not as simple as one might suppose. For example, rights "retained by the people" can not exist or be asserted in those situations where the government secretly hides what it is doing from the people. Keeping some secrets, for a reasonable period of time, is permissible, but ultimately the right of long term public oversight over government must come into play.
Any legal proceeding that ignores these considerations is not valid.
It does, however, mention persons held to service or labour. This is often known as the "fugitive slave clause"(Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3):
"No person held to service or labour in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labour, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due."
Even here the word "slave" does not appear, so calling this the "fugitive slave clause" is a bit of a misnomer.
It is, of course, significant that the words "in one state, under the laws thereof" appear, thus making it plain that while the Constitution itself did not authorize slavery per se at a federal level, it did permit persons being "held to service or labour" -- a somewhat vague phrase with lots of room for abuse -- at the state level. Indentured service (different from slavery) did exist in the colonies: the wording here could apply to either slaves of indentured servants.
It has been argued that some of the Founding Fathers, including Benjamin Franklin, supported separation from England in large part because attempts to end slavery had been repeatedly quashed by the British Crown.
The vast majority (well over 90%) of slaves shipped from Africa went to the Caribbean or South America, not North America. This was due in large part to the very high rates of death for slaves in the sugar plantations found in that part of the world. These plantations were run by the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. This trade was permitted by Britain until long after the American Revolution, finally being outlawed by act of Parliament in 1807 (in part due to the efforts of William Wilberforce).
It is well established in the historical record that many other Founding Fathers were opposed to slavery.
Many of the abuses associated with the slavery system could reasonably be considered violations of the Bill of Rights. It may have been the intention of those Founding Father's opposed to slavery to eventually use this, along with the Federal control over interstate commerce, as tools to quash slavery entirely.
More probable however, is that the Feds would just retroactively immunize whoever
It can be shown that not within the legal authority of government at any level in the US to provide immunity or a pardon for violations of fundamental rights. This can be demonstrated using a technique of logic known is proof by contradiction, attributed to Euclid, from thousands of years ago.
The proof proceeds as follows: We assume that the government does have this authority. Then, any fundamental right can be violated by government as no penalty for doing so can be imposed. Thus, the government can violate any rights that might otherwise be retained by the people, or reserved to the people. However, the 9th and 10th Amendments to the Bill of Rights specifically provides for the existence of such rights. We have a contradiction, and thus the original assumption is shown to be false: the government can not immunize its members for violations of fundamental rights.
Any court rulings to the contrary would, of course, constitute a violation of the judge or judge's oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights. This applies to judges at any level, including the Supreme Court. By a similar argument (another proof by contradiction argument, the details of which are left to the reader), we can show that such persons have no legal authority to violate their oaths, and can reasonably go further and show that any attempt to violate such an oath immediately and permanently disqualifies the parties involved from holding any position of public trust or responsibility.
Further, under the Nuremberg Precedent, which can reasonably be asserted as arising under the 9th Amendment as a right "retained by the people", all members of government would have an individual and personal obligation to refuse to recognize as valid any court ruling, executive order, or other government action that attempted to immunize members of government for a violation of fundamental rights.
Umm, when was the last time you were in court, win or lose, and DIDN'T have to pay court fees?
This seems likely to depend upon the policies in a particular jurisdiction, and possibly even upon the details of the case. Certainly I didn't have to pay anything the last time I was in court (admittedly quite a few years ago, so perhaps things have changed).
There may even be some serious ethics (and even legal) problems associated with government forcing people to pay money (and have their time wasted) when they haven't in fact done anything wrong. I would expect these kinds of policies would gradually go away over time if we as a society were to start paying more attention to ethics in government and law.
Your point about the ultimate cost of the law coming out of our taxes is a good one. I don't think most people would mind this cost if the legal system was perceived as being fair, reasonable, and rational. Unfortunately, it is probably more accurate to view the system as being badly broken, which may account for the attempt of private organizations to work around the system instead of through it.
Does anyone consider the actions of the legal professionals representing the trademark holder ethical conduct? Should we have stronger rules for deciding what does and does not constitute ethical conduct for legal professionals?
For example: if a currently profitable company has a big pension fund saved up to pay out to retirees, corporate raiders will load the company up with debt, funneling all its money to "contractors" and "consultants" until they are "forced" to dip into the pension funds to keep the company afloat. When all the assets are gone, tell the workers and retirees "sorry, we're bankrupt!" before cruising away on your new yacht.
It is appropriate to treat this as criminal conduct. In a rational implementation of the Bill of Rights, the protection of money in a retirement fund should fall naturally under the 9th Amendment as a right retained by the people. Thus any form of plundering should be actionable as a matter of violating fundamental rights, superseding federal law when that law would otherwise permit plundering.
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The Report has no authority from a legal standpoint--it's only a comment on the document, admittedly by an important person.
Perhaps you would benefit from studying the history of the ratification of the Constitution. There is a tendency for those unfamiliar with the history to treat Constitutional law matters as if they were Contract Law matters ("Oh well, you signed it ("ratified it"), so you're bound by it whether it makes sense or not"). It doesn't even work that way in Contract Law!
There was considerable disagreement over accepting the Constitution. Two states refused to do so outright. In other states, promises were made by men of honor, such as the aforementioned James Madison, that a Bill of Rights would be added. The "ratification" was not in any real way binding upon the states. They knew perfectly well that if the promises made did not come to pass it was neither militarily nor politically feasible (at that time) to force any state to join or remain in the Union.
The "legal authority" of the Constitution, as such, must be considered both a) tentative, and b) overridden by the Bill of Rights (also primarily written by James Madison).
As Madison wrote the Bill of Rights to be an open-ended document (that's what's meant by "rights retained by the people" - 9th Amendment - and "rights reserved to the people" - 10th Amendment), his words certainly can and do carry legal weight as they give us a starting point for fleshing out those unspecified rights.
True, but recording studios have complex requirements that may not be applicable here. Sound attenuation through materials is a function of frequency and thickness, and bass, for example, is a lot harder to block than higher frequencies. The (more or less) higher frequencies associated with human voice might not be as hard to block.
I can't tell from your post whether the noise is coming from rooms to the side of you, or above, or through the door, or through the windows, or even reflecting off a hard floor.
If it's mostly coming from one wall, you might have an option. Would they let you put some portable insulation against a wall? You can get some 1 inch thick 4'x8' rigid foam sheets at the bigger hardware stores for about $10, and possibly tape these together against the wall (or use furniture to hold them up). It wouldn't be perfect, but it might help block some of the noise, and you could take these with you when you leave.
A thick floor carpet can also help reduce noise.
Nice post. I'll elaborate a bit on what you said.
A person looking to "get fit" needs to think about what it really means to "be fit". There is far more to being fit than just muscle strength or aerobic fitness (both of which are necessary, but not sufficient). To be truly fit individual, you also need to work on balance, coordination, and flexibility (all of which tend to be extremely poor for most people in today's world -- especially us nerds -- typically the result of accumulated bad habits, lack of good education, and neglect).
It is not just the physical muscles that atrophy over time in the presence of neglect, it is also the control and coordination of those muscles (or, the ability of the brain to drive the nervous system to use the muscles) that atrophies. Strength building activities that isolate muscles, and simple, repetitive aerobic fitness movements will not fully restore this lost control, let alone increase it over time. There is a world of difference between how a highly trained dancer or martial artist moves and uses their body, even in everyday life and outside the scope of these hobbies, versus an ordinary person that limits themselves to just lifting weights / running / biking / hiking / etc. Truly being fit requires reversing both types of atrophy.
Working on coordination of muscles also tends to help people learn to be more physically relaxed, without having to first tire out their muscles to get them to relax. Most people I see in offices are carrying a LOT of unnecessary tension.
Yoga, Pilates, and Tai Chi are all potentially great for working on the more subtle aspects of physical fitness in the office, iff you have a good understanding of what you're trying to achieve. Good instruction is essential. Patience and a sense of humor help as well.
Typically you'll need to be selective in what and how you do in order to fit these activities into an office space (and to be able to do these in office clothing).
In addition to a variety of Internet sources of information on this stuff, there are also a number of good books and dvds that can help you with this. Try looking up "office yoga", or look up the word "chair" paired with one of the following: "yoga", or "pilates", "tai chi", or even "exercise".
Another good option is to get an inflatable balance ball or a balance platform. Many exercises that can be done standing can also be done while balancing, with some care. Safety first!
More to the point, if the treaty invalidates the Bill of Rights, an open-ended document due to the presence of the 9th Amendment, the treaty would not be valid in the first place. At least some applications of unlocking phones would have to be considered an exercise of reasonable conduct rights arising under the 9th Amendment.
We know from history that treaties can not infringe fundamental rights. Consider the following:
Two states refused to ratify the original Constitution. Other states only ratified after men of honor such as James Madison, whose promises were trusted, promised to add a Bill of Rights. All of the states knew that they could withdraw at any time, should these promises not come to fruition, as it was neither militarily nor politically feasible (at that time) to force any state to be part of the Union.
If these states were prepared to trust the authority of the federal government, including the authority granted by the treaty power, then there would have been no need for a Bill of Rights. However, the history shows that the states felt a strong need for a Bill of Rights, and hence they were not prepared to trust the federal government with the powers granted in the original Constitution.
This history clearly shows the authority of the Bill of Rights is intended to trump the powers granted in the earlier parts of the Constitution, including the treaty power.
Simple logic confirms this (essentially a proof by contradiction argument): if the treaty power could trump the Bill of Rights, then any right could be infringed merely by writing a treaty to do it, and no rights would exist. However, the Bill of Rights provides for the existence of rights (and in fact makes the list of possible rights open-ended), we have a contradiction, and the original assumption that the treaty power trumps the Bill of Rights is shown to be invalid.
It seems the only reason a lawyer would ever study the constitution is to find ways to subvert it.
If you do decide to study Constitutional law, I'd say you'll find the situation is not quite as bad as you suppose.
Not everyone that studies Constitutional law is practicing lawyer. We would be better off as a society if more non-lawyers became familiar with this area of law. Typical law textbooks are written at roughly the same level of difficulty as the easier social science or history textbooks. In other words, they're a lot easier to read than the average math, physics, engineering, or medical text books, which means the subject should be accessible to anyone reading Slashdot that wants to invest the time ...
There have been many good decisions.
Thus, in many cases, lawyers have in fact used their knowledge of the Constitution to do actual good, surprising though this may seem.
There have also been many bad decisions.
The problem with many of the bad decisions is that they often don't seem that unreasonable, at first glance, or when examined in isolation. It's often the case that the bad decisions only pose a serious problem when one looks at the long term implications. Not everyone has enough knowledge of history or understanding of the world, to see the long term implications, and not everyone that does see these implications has the moral courage to recognize bad decisions as invalid.
The real problem with how lawyers study Constitutional law tends to flow from two facts 1) Lawyers make up the majority of the people that study Constitutional law, and 2) Legal professionals, as a class in society, are in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to the nature, scope, and form of the legal system.
As a consequence, this means most of those studying this area of law can be presumed to be "highly biased observers" (as a social scientist might put things).
There are many inconsistencies, problems, and even contradictions that exist within the legal system, and it seems plausible the legal community will never find it convenient to resolve these issues, because of this conflict of interest.
In turn, the excessive complexity, inconsistencies, and lack of coherence in the legal system makes it possible for government invasions of privacy and lots of other bad stuff to occur.
Or, putting this in nerd terms, the chaos, or entropy, in the legal system tends to increase over time so long as the only people studying, implementing, and working on changing that system are legal professionals (making it a closed system). We had a big infusion of energy from an outside source in the 60's, in the form of the "Civil Rights" movement, which worked to correct some of the problems. We're probably long due for another.
The really big problem with these kinds of things is the ethics issue, which, interestingly, didn't appear to get raised in this case. No rational society would expect murder investigations to pay for themselves: why are traffic violations treated any differently?
Perhaps the legal professionals involved didn't want to encourage anybody to be taking too close a look at ethics, given how many problems the U.S. legal system has with respect to this.
If the money for a traffic ticket goes into the budget of the issuing government in any way, shape, or form, that inherently creates an ethical conflict of interest with respect to the issuing of tickets. In such circumstances, we do not and can not know whether tickets are being issued as a legitimate exercise of government authority, or rather because the ticket provides income to pay the salary of the issuing officer, or perhaps to provide money for the officer's political superiors to pay for projects that get them re-elected (which in turn gives the officer an incentive to write the ticket in order to get raises, promotions, and other benefits that those superiors can provide). This inability to perceive whether the government is acting legitimately creates contempt for the government on the part of the public and that in turn leads to lots of negative consequences for a society.
No legitimate government should be engaging in such practices. The right to ethical conduct on the part of government is a fundamental human right, and even the appearance of conflict of interest must be avoided whenever possible. Hence, any money that a government gets in the form of tickets needs to be dispersed in a manner that is consistent with ethics. It can not, for example, become part of the government's budget. It might be permissible to give that money to some worthy cause in a land far away (even here, we would have to have appropriate limits on how this is done).
In this particular case, I would assert the right to ethical government and ethical legal practice to be a fundamental right arising under the 9th Amendment, and thus this government is not just violating the due process part of the US Constitution, but a more fundamental right.
Advertising is societal corrosion. It eats away at our experiences, it reshapes our thoughts, it homogenizes and neuters our culture, and it's all because people such as yourself see "not making any money" as an inherent problem with all sorts of aspects of our lives.
Another problem with advertising: it violates what should be a fundamental human right, namely the right to not be forced to be part of an audience. Just as the freedom to wave one's fist around can be constrained when that fist goes into another person's private space, so should the freedom to publish (i.e. rights such as freedom of the press, freedom of speech) be constrained when it intrudes into another person's life.
Or, in other words, one is not living in a free country if one is coerced into watching, seeing, or hearing advertising.
some ideals are timeless and beyond debate.
life
liberty
freedom from oppression
those are the core ideals
You (and the Founding Fathers) missed a core ideal: ethical government (and ethical law). The absence of this in so many current legal and governmental matters is a major factor why the others are being eroded.
So as society progresses slavery might be a good idea again.
Many of the Founding Fathers were strongly opposed to slavery. Ben Franklin, for example, stated that the American Revolution was necessary due to the resistance on the part of the British Government against ending slavery.
Ironic, given how things turned out. Or, perhaps, it would be better to say that then, like now, entrenched corruption won out over principles.
That or Yahoo's hiring process is so flawed they ended up employing society's layabouts and nothing else.
No, that's only the policy for hiring at the executive level.
If you study constitutional law, you'll find that changes to the Constitution have been happening almost since the beginning of the country (and that's NOT counting the official amendments).
Unfortunately, many of these changes are "under the radar" of the average person, who is likely to believe (as I have had people tell me) that Constitutional Law has no relevance to them.
I share your skepticism about the likelihood that changes implemented by the current political system would be good. Neither of the two dominant political parties has much interest in reform, and neither does the legal profession.
It's interesting how the Bill of Rights prevents Congress from passing any law infringing freedom of speech, but yet one can be coerced into testifying before a court or before Congress.
Contradictions in the legal system inherently make it more complex and confusing to ordinary, which tends to create an artificial long term demand for the services of legal professionals. We can presume that the acceptance of the current federal rules on coerced testimony, rules that contradict the written text of the 1st Amendment, reflects unethical conduct on the part of the legal profession.
As the 1st Amendment can reasonably be regarded as being extended with respect to state and local governments by the 14th Amendment, we can also presume unethical conduct on the part of legal professionals who accept rules regarding coerced testimony at these levels.
It would be better to amend the Constitution to have explicit rules governing when the government can coerce testimony. This would both remove the contradiction, and make explicit what the rules actually are.
For example, if a person chooses to testify in a case, it should be possible to engage in a reasonable cross-examination: the Constitutional amendment could permit this.
It is not clear that there is any justification to force a person to testify, except under a limited set of circumstances. We might have a rule where persons can be coerced to testify regarding government service, while in government service or for five years afterwards, subject to reasonable compensation for their time, and also subject to reasonable limitation on scope (merely because a person works for the government does not necessarily authorize the government to engage in a massive violation of their privacy or other fundamental rights: a balance between individual rights and the needs of the public must always be struck).
Similarly, we might have a rule where we can require a person to testify when somebody else's life can reasonably be supposed to be in immediate danger, subject to the limitation that such testimony can not be held against them.
No legitimate government should be able to force a person to reveal a password for personal files.
For example, would you want a court system where juries were composed only of people who self-selected as volunteers for jury service? You did use the expression "time wasted" so perhaps this kind of thing isn't something you'd consider a waste of time, but in that case, where do you draw the line? And of course in a rather different example, the very premise of prison as a penalty is that it is the government deliberately wasting your time.
I like your suggestion about reasonable equality.
Unlike the case in the physical sciences, in general human matters we often do have to come up with ways to drawing lines without the luxury of precise or accurate measures. This is an unavoidable aspect of law. Recognizing this is realistic.
One possible rule that would follow from the right to not have one's time wasted would be a rule that prison time was a waste of a person's time if the person wasn't actually guilty of behavior that any reasonable society would consider wrongful.
Thus, for example, for those persons convicted of rape, who have been subsequently set free as a result of DNA evidence, their time was wasted and hence their right to not have their time wasted was violated. This in turn provides a justification for compensating those individuals for the time the state has stolen from their lives.
Your idea of providing compensation to those who are forced to take the time to defend themselves is very much consistent with the assertion of rights that recognize the time of individuals has value.
Jury service is an area of law that often fails to recognize the value of the time of individuals (aside from the legal professionals, the value of whose time is clearly being recognized by the system, at least here). It would not make sense to have people self selected for jury service, but we could have stronger rules limiting the ability of government to coerce people into jury service in order to make the policies regarding jury service more consistent with fundamental rights. For example, we might decide that if a person serves on a jury for x number of days (where "serves" includes the who selection process), then they are immune to jury service for x number of years. Similarly, if a person serves for y days, where y >> x, then they are immune to jury service for their rest of their lives.
We might also have stronger rules governing the cases that can be brought into court, and when a jury needs to see those cases, to make sure we aren't taking time away from people's lives without first having carefully thought about it.
Remember that you're talking about organizations that use "safety cameras" that are often paid for by the fines they generate, yet which would generate no money if they succeeded in their claimed goals of making drivers go more slowly, stopping people running red lights, etc. A large part of the automated traffic enforcement industry is built on fundamental conflicts of interest.
These conflicts of interest are exactly why there shouldn't be an automated traffic enforcement industry. Taxes can be used to pay for the police officers and associated equipment needed for a reasonable level of traffic enforcement. There is no need to have traffic enforcement pay for itself, any more than we need to have criminal investigation pay for itself. Competent, responsible governments will manage to balance their budgets without resorting to unethical practices.
It seems like this discussion is comparing apples and oranges.
Having some houses in Europe, even in Norway, that are very well insulated does not mean that all houses in Europe are equally well insulated. For less well insulated houses, house size would then become a factor.
I think you'd need to do some more research before you could justify concluding that the quality of insulation, rather than house size, determines the (purported) ability of Europeans to consume less energy.
To start with, are we sure we're measuring energy consumption correctly, and doing it in the same way for both populations? Are we comparing energy consumption of houses, or do commercial buildings get added into the mix? What about buildings that are both commercial and residential?
Further, without some more detailed data on where and how energy is being consumed, it is hard to compare the energy consumption of two groups of people and draw useful conclusions. For example, 1. Is most of the difference in energy consumption coming down to heating and cooling the house, or are there other high sources of energy consumption (perhaps different patterns of preparing food, or patterns of lighting usage) that affect the energy usage? 2. Is air conditioning, cleaning, and/or humidification (or dehumidification) used to the same extent in the two populations? 3. Are the population numbers in cold areas, or windy areas, or areas with both high heat and humidity, the same? For that matter, cold humid areas might results in different patterns of energy usage from dry humid areas. 4. Are the energy differences primarily associated with losses in people's houses, or with commercial buildings, or with inefficiencies in the generation and distribution of power?
Another possible complication would involve looking at fundamental building technology. Are there differences in the numbers of wood versus brick houses (or other structures) between Europe and the USA, and if so what impact does this have on the cost of insulation? What other environmental impacts do different housing technologies have? Are there differences in the ratio of newer to older houses between the two areas, and what impact does this have on energy consumed?
Another set of things to think about would be 1) how much energy is consumed to produce the technologies needed for high insulation, 2) how much energy is needed to transport and install these technologies, and 3) how much energy is needed to rebuild older houses to bring them up to modern standards. Also, 4) what energy costs are associated with legislation of high-insulation standards, the implementation of these standards, and the enforcement of them? Then, 5) what are the long term energy costs of maintaining the high-insulation technologies?
Further, energy costs are not the only consideration. It takes time and money to do things, so if we are spending time and money to "improve" the environment by improving the insulation of homes, what environmental problems are we forced to not work on because our supply of time and money is finite?
Are there subtle negative environmental impacts from the use of the more modern, high-insulation technologies, such as issues resulting from some aspects of the production, distribution, installation, and maintenance processes for these technologies?
We might also ask if there are negative environmental impacts, or other types of negative impact, such as negative impacts on a society, resulting from having smaller houses. Are there things people have to do differently, in the course of their lives, as a result of living in a smaller house that have a negative impact on the environment? Are more people living in shared houses or apartments in one society than the other, and what impact does this have on the society?
Finally, what subtle, long-term health impacts might result from long term exposure to closed environments, such as we find in extremely well insulated houses?
Unfortunately, the US legal system has been badly broken for a long time (some have argued that the system has been broken since the country was founded).
The problems with the patent and copyright systems aren't even the worst aspects of the problem, despite the massive popularity of discussions on those topics here on Slashdot. There are problems with many different aspects of the legal system, and some of these problems have far more negative impact on society (and on us nerds) than the broken patent and copyright laws.
Tort law is one of the particularly bad problem areas. It is not an accident that the USA is known as the "Land of the Lawsuit", or that there is a popular conception of lawyers as unethical jerks looking to abuse the system for their own gain (and at the expense of society). Rather, these things reflect a intuition that the public has that there is something fundamentally wrong in the legal system. Folks are starting to perceive that something is rotten in the state of law, so to speak, without really understanding the details.
For people who are in the right to effectively lose lawsuits because they can not afford to win them, or to effectively lose even when they "win", makes people scared of the legal system. Excessively complex laws, or contradictory laws, do the same. Scared people naturally look for somebody to protect them, and with respect to the legal system, the only ones that can provide protection are the legal professionals.
Thus, legal professionals, as a class in society, are in position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to many aspects of how lawsuits (and other legal matters) are handled. By choosing to handle these matters in a sloppy or incompetent manner, by making the legal system run in a glacially slow manner, by ignoring ethical conflicts of interest or fundamental rights, and by creating the perception that the legal system is complex, confusing, and scary, the legal profession creates long term business for itself.
This is not to say that all legal professionals are doing this. There are some good people in the profession. However, serious reform is needed, and it doesn't seem like there are enough good people in the profession for this to happen from within, which means it needs to be driven from outside the profession.
Most members of Congress, and many state legislators, are legal professionals, and these people are the ones that decide what the laws governing the legal profession will be. The bar associations, judges, and prosecutors also play a significant role in deciding how those laws work. Thus, almost everybody deciding what is or is not reasonable for legal professionals to do and what is or is not a reasonable part of the legal system is a legal professional.
This means the folks who write, interpret, and execute the laws governing the practice of law have a huge ethical conflict of interest with respect to exactly what appears in those laws.
In a sense, we have a group of foxes deciding for themselves under what circumstances a fox may be trusted to guard the hen-house.
There is nothing written into the Constitution or the Bill of Rights giving legal professionals this kind of power. In fact, it has been asserted that the right to have ethical conduct from legal professionals, having them avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest, arises under the 9th and 10th Amendments (rights retained by the people, and rights reserved to the people) and thus the current system can be considered to be contrary to the Bill of Rights.
Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that the legal profession has been fairly successful in keeping the average American from realizing just how many conflicts of interest and other problems involving their profession are buried in the legal system. For some strange reason, our professional press rarely seems to pick up on these issues, either.
I'd assert a right to not have one's time wasted by the government is a fundamental human right. The human lifespan, after all, is finite, and far too short for most of us. When a kidnapper or murderer steals a portion of a person's life, we consider that a wrongful act. For the government to steal a portion of a person's life should also be a wrongful act.
Thus, legal policies that permit one to be uncompensated are appropriately viewed as being in violation of a fundamental human right.
For the traffic offenses, can the UK national or local governments put the money for these fines into their budget? If the money goes ANYWHERE into the budget, that creates a major ethical conflict of interest, and I'd say not having government or the legal profession acting from a position of ethical conflict of interest would be another fundamental right.
For that matter, a policy of not compensating people for having to appear in court could be considered to represent ethical conflict of interest on the part of the legal profession (who presumably play a large role in determining such policies). After all, the more of a person's own time they potentially have to waste in court, the greater the demand for the services of a legal professional that could spend that time on one's behalf.
We paid for it. We should be able to see it, and profit from it.
There is not necessarily, however, a need to see it and profit from it immediately.
A long term right of public oversight over government can be asserted as a fundamental human right in a free country. Exactly what constitutes "long term" would vary from situation to situation, but for many things meaningful oversight should reasonably be able to happen within a few years of events.
In the USA, a fundamental right such as this can be asserted under the 9th Amendment ("rights retained by the people") and the 10th Amendment ("rights reserved to the people").
As such, to the extent that current US copyright law allows publishers to keep control over publicly funded research publications for extended periods of time, that law exists in violation of fundamental rights and is unconstitutional.
The correct long-term solution to this problem is not to worry about the prestige of open-source journals, which will doubtless appear in some fields on their own, and may even supersede the existing journals, but rather to change the current copyright law. As the current copyright law violates the Bill of Rights, any treaty provisions that would prevent such changes are rendered null and void.
The vast majority of research publications (those that receive any public funding, even so much as one dollar) should be made available to the public, free of charge, in an open, easily searchable and usable format, within 1 to 5 years after publication. Making this happen is part of the responsibility that researchers accept in return for the public support they receive.
Having a delay like this between initial publication and making things freely available allows publishers a chance to make reasonable profits, which in turn allows for pre-publication peer review and editing. These processes, while far from perfect, both have considerable value to society, as most writers have difficulty assessing their own work.
You're dancing around the most important thing we need: legal ethics reform.
Legal professionals are in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to the nature, scope, and form of the legal system. Over the long term this conflict of interest has created many problems within the US legal system, the broken patent and copyright laws being just two of the more obvious ones.
This is not to say that all lawyers are unethical. There are some highly ethical lawyers, but it appears they are badly outnumbered.
Take care of legal ethics reform, and software patent reform will become a real possibility. Ignore the legal ethics issues and 1) you'll never get patent reform, and 2) "loser pays" will be abused just as badly as the current system.
The proposed law seems like yet another attempt to side-step the core problem. Not surprising, considering that most legislators are legal professionals (and also considering that the American Bar Association is the most powerful lobbying group in the country), but not where we need to be going as a society.
Someone volunteering to join the military also agrees to be bound by the UCMJ.
It's not that simple. This isn't really a question of contract law, despite the presence of a contract when one joins the military.
The ability of Congress to create laws to govern the military are subject to fundamental rights, as are any powers of Congress. Some of the fundamental rights that apply to civilians can reasonably be lost or limited in military service. However, to the extent that the UCMJ infringes fundamental rights that reasonably should be retained by persons in military service, the UCMJ becomes illegal and unconstitutional.
It is worth remembering that members of the German military in WW2 were required by law to obey orders passed by their superior officers. At Nuremberg it was established that not all laws passed by governments are valid. The UCMJ is a set of laws, no more, no less.
As the Bill of Rights is open-ended (the 9th Amendment provides for rights "retained by the people" and the 10th Amendment provides for rights "reserved to the people"), determining what rights can reasonably be taken away from members of the military is not as simple as one might suppose. For example, rights "retained by the people" can not exist or be asserted in those situations where the government secretly hides what it is doing from the people. Keeping some secrets, for a reasonable period of time, is permissible, but ultimately the right of long term public oversight over government must come into play.
Any legal proceeding that ignores these considerations is not valid.
Constitution doesn't mention slaves.
It does, however, mention persons held to service or labour. This is often known as the "fugitive slave clause"(Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3):
"No person held to service or labour in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labour, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due."
Even here the word "slave" does not appear, so calling this the "fugitive slave clause" is a bit of a misnomer.
It is, of course, significant that the words "in one state, under the laws thereof" appear, thus making it plain that while the Constitution itself did not authorize slavery per se at a federal level, it did permit persons being "held to service or labour" -- a somewhat vague phrase with lots of room for abuse -- at the state level. Indentured service (different from slavery) did exist in the colonies: the wording here could apply to either slaves of indentured servants.
It has been argued that some of the Founding Fathers, including Benjamin Franklin, supported separation from England in large part because attempts to end slavery had been repeatedly quashed by the British Crown.
The vast majority (well over 90%) of slaves shipped from Africa went to the Caribbean or South America, not North America. This was due in large part to the very high rates of death for slaves in the sugar plantations found in that part of the world. These plantations were run by the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. This trade was permitted by Britain until long after the American Revolution, finally being outlawed by act of Parliament in 1807 (in part due to the efforts of William Wilberforce).
It is well established in the historical record that many other Founding Fathers were opposed to slavery.
Many of the abuses associated with the slavery system could reasonably be considered violations of the Bill of Rights. It may have been the intention of those Founding Father's opposed to slavery to eventually use this, along with the Federal control over interstate commerce, as tools to quash slavery entirely.
More probable however, is that the Feds would just retroactively immunize whoever
It can be shown that not within the legal authority of government at any level in the US to provide immunity or a pardon for violations of fundamental rights. This can be demonstrated using a technique of logic known is proof by contradiction, attributed to Euclid, from thousands of years ago.
The proof proceeds as follows: We assume that the government does have this authority. Then, any fundamental right can be violated by government as no penalty for doing so can be imposed. Thus, the government can violate any rights that might otherwise be retained by the people, or reserved to the people. However, the 9th and 10th Amendments to the Bill of Rights specifically provides for the existence of such rights. We have a contradiction, and thus the original assumption is shown to be false: the government can not immunize its members for violations of fundamental rights.
Any court rulings to the contrary would, of course, constitute a violation of the judge or judge's oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights. This applies to judges at any level, including the Supreme Court. By a similar argument (another proof by contradiction argument, the details of which are left to the reader), we can show that such persons have no legal authority to violate their oaths, and can reasonably go further and show that any attempt to violate such an oath immediately and permanently disqualifies the parties involved from holding any position of public trust or responsibility.
Further, under the Nuremberg Precedent, which can reasonably be asserted as arising under the 9th Amendment as a right "retained by the people", all members of government would have an individual and personal obligation to refuse to recognize as valid any court ruling, executive order, or other government action that attempted to immunize members of government for a violation of fundamental rights.
Umm, when was the last time you were in court, win or lose, and DIDN'T have to pay court fees?
This seems likely to depend upon the policies in a particular jurisdiction, and possibly even upon the details of the case. Certainly I didn't have to pay anything the last time I was in court (admittedly quite a few years ago, so perhaps things have changed).
There may even be some serious ethics (and even legal) problems associated with government forcing people to pay money (and have their time wasted) when they haven't in fact done anything wrong. I would expect these kinds of policies would gradually go away over time if we as a society were to start paying more attention to ethics in government and law.
Your point about the ultimate cost of the law coming out of our taxes is a good one. I don't think most people would mind this cost if the legal system was perceived as being fair, reasonable, and rational. Unfortunately, it is probably more accurate to view the system as being badly broken, which may account for the attempt of private organizations to work around the system instead of through it.
Does anyone consider the actions of the legal professionals representing the trademark holder ethical conduct? Should we have stronger rules for deciding what does and does not constitute ethical conduct for legal professionals?
For example: if a currently profitable company has a big pension fund saved up to pay out to retirees, corporate raiders will load the company up with debt, funneling all its money to "contractors" and "consultants" until they are "forced" to dip into the pension funds to keep the company afloat. When all the assets are gone, tell the workers and retirees "sorry, we're bankrupt!" before cruising away on your new yacht.
It is appropriate to treat this as criminal conduct. In a rational implementation of the Bill of Rights, the protection of money in a retirement fund should fall naturally under the 9th Amendment as a right retained by the people. Thus any form of plundering should be actionable as a matter of violating fundamental rights, superseding federal law when that law would otherwise permit plundering.