I liked Boris Johnson's opinion piece in the Telegraph today where he attacked Jaqui Smith's decision to list Michael Savage on a list of people 'banned' from entering the UK. Savage seems like a fairly nasty piece of work, but nobody seriously thinks that a visit from him would put anyone at risk, do they? As I said about Canada's exclusion of Galloway, this seems to be a case of using laws 'to send a message'. I think that's a bad idea. I think it makes people take the law less seriously.
Can you think of a case where law is sensibly used to 'send a message' rather than serving a directly practical purpose?
Monday, May 11, 2009
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He is NOT a nasty piece of work. Have you listened to anything other than the sound bites broadcast by the British media? Just because he has opinions which don't conform to the Orwellian liberal agenda, does NOT mean he is nasty. He's an intelligent, articulate, erudite, and all-round good guy - who just happens to believe that his country is collapsing around him. I and many others agree with him. Incidentally, I live in Britain, I'm conservative, and I see quite clearly what 50 years of liberal socialism have reduced this once great nation to.
ReplyDeleteLN
That's a great question. I wonder, though, whether practicality and communication are necessarily mutually exclusive?
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking, for example, of the successful prosecutions of neo-Nazis Simon Sheppard and Stephen Whittle, found guilty under British law of disseminating racially inflammatory material. This is illegal in the UK but the significance of the ruling is that the material in question was on a website hosted in the US. This was a communicative prosecution, in the sense that it told British citizens that whilst resident in the UK such activities are illegal, no matter where the material is hosted. It was also practical, in that Sheppard and Whittle were clearly in breach of British law.
Less practical, perhaps, is the fact that their website, Heretical Press, is still online and accessible globally. The First Amendment to the US Constitution is in action, and a matter for American courts, but does not extend to UK citizens in the UK, as their convictions showed.
In the current context of excluding individuals like Savage, Geert Wilders, etc, the policy is plainly ridiculous, in my opinion. Aside from the complexities of (inter)national human rights legislation, it's simply counterproductive.
I would think that anti piracy and drug possession laws are related examples of this message sending pattern. The key thing seems to be in some way sanctioning individuals to affect more general behaviour.
ReplyDeleteIf you also require that the message isn't just deterrence by "don't do this or look at what will happen to you" but instead by "look at this, it is sanctioned against and therefore wrong" then I think both drug possession and piracy still fit.
If you also require it to be a political or 'thematic' message without a specific 'bad' action being implied then I can't think of any examples that seem just.
The CIA torture trials would have been examples if they'd happened.
If the above misses the point let me know
BM
Looking at this again I think the pattern you're interested in is sanctioning against A to prevent people from doing B and/or getting them to think that B is wrong. With A being thematically similar but not the same as B. Furthermore, I think you want A to be a law/tool of law which can be applied with discretion.
ReplyDeleteOnly if the intention of sanctioning against A for B's prevention is obvious do I think that observers will lose respect. If the state might believably be applying A for A's sake without specific concern for B then this won't be clear enough. Don't assume people who might think that the application was for B's sake would actually decide that it was.
Also people are more likely to lose respect for the application of the law than for the law itself
I think the overriding assessment people make in "taking the law less seriously" is when they feel a law, as applied, is not fit for purpose in the given case.
More than that, I'd say people have to feel that either something they want to happen and feel is just can't or something they don't want to happen and feel is just has.
In this case there will be very few people who want this man to enter the country, and only those who care about the abstract principles of justice will meet the criteria of the previous paragraph.