Stardate 20020720.1527

(Captain's log): What is law? It's the rules that a society sets and enforces on its members. What is its purpose? What should it accomplish?

Ah, there lies the issue. There's been no consensus in history on that. Different societies in different places and times have had radically different opinions about that. Sometimes the purpose of the law is to enforce religious dicta, and to make everyone live a righteous life whether they want to or not. Sometimes the primary purpose of the law is to keep the current rulers in power. The question of who makes the law, how they decide what law to make, what the law should perform, and how it should be enforced is the largest and most important question in political theory, and it hasn't been settled yet.

What some consider law in their nations would be considered violent assault in others. In Saudi Arabia, small groups of men carrying canes walk the streets looking for people who are acting in ways which violate the law, such as not praying at the appointed time, or of wearing styles of clothing which are banned. When such transgressions are found, the transgressors are beaten on the spot. This is completely legal in Saudi Arabia, but if someone were to do that here, they'd be arrested and tried.

In China and in Iran, it is illegal to publicly criticize the government. Those who do can be sent away for a long time, or in very extreme cases can be executed (for blasphemy, in some Islamic nations).

In the US, our general ideas are as follows, which I'll show as bullet-points because each one is critical.

• Government rules by consent of the people, with a grant of power from the people.
• The grant of power is limited, and there are many things the government isn't permitted to do.
• Laws are made by representatives of the people.
• Those representatives must submit themselves to the people for approval (reelection) on a regular basis and can be removed from office if they abuse their power.
• All laws are subject to review by an independent judiciary, which can nullify them if they are found to exceed the limited powers granted to the government.
• The indictment and trial processes are run by the government, but all the important decisions are made by citizens serving in juries.
• If the citizens ever say "no" to the government, there is no appeal. If a politician is not reelected, he's out. If a jury acquits a defendant, he can't be tried again for that crime.

The fundamental purpose of all of this is recognition that unlimited ability to pass and enforce laws will be abused, so we keep our government on tight leash. Our system is based on the assumption that government, and law, are to serve the interests of citizens. The jury system is the final and most important check on the process, because of a principle known as "jury nullification", where the jury simply refuses to convict someone of violating a law that the members of the jury consider unjust. It doesn't happen often, but it has been known to occur.

Some censorship laws eventually fell this way. When the movie Deep Throat became a cult success, certain theater owners were tried under censorship laws for showing the film, and the juries found that the film was not "obscene" under the law, even though it clearly was. The juries in question were clearly indicating their opinion that the law itself was in error. Jury nullification isn't very common, but the reason why is that it isn't actually needed much. It's more a threat that lawmakers cannot and do not ignore, for jury members who nullify a law are also expressing the will of voters in the next election. (And there's always a "next election.")

Not all law in the world is created equal. Walk down any American beach in the summer and you'll see hundreds of people violating the laws of Saudi Arabia. But America isn't Saudi Arabia, and Saudi law doesn't apply here. That law wasn't made according to American legal principles, and we don't acknowledge its application to us. If a group of men with canes tried to walk down that beach beating every woman in a bikini, they'd only make it about twenty feet before they were stopped.

Does that mean we consider ourselves "above the law" when it comes to Sharia? I suppose you might say that, but it's not really correct. It's rather that we don't consider Sharia to be "law" at all, by our definition of the term. It may well be "law" according to fundamentalist Muslims, and it is law in some sort of generic sense, but it isn't American law. By the same token, a French law banning sale and display of Nazi paraphernalia cannot be applied to Americans in the United States, because it was not passed by our lawmakers; it isn't subject to nullification by our judiciary, and it infringes certain limits on governmental power guaranteed to us by the Bill of Rights.

There is no "The Law". There are a lot of different bodies of law. Some we agree to, some we don't. Each society makes its own decisions about that, and abides by the consequences.

There is no "International Law." One of the rhetorical devices being used by those criticizing American resistance to the International Criminal Court has been to say things like "America considers itself above the law." Deliberately or not, this is a means of muddying the waters. By trying to channel the discussion into whether America should obey International Law, it skips over the more basic question of whether International Law is really "law" at all. It is my opinion that it is not, and n