The Law

My background is that I got married at nineteen to another nineteen year old with whom I had graduated high school. He joined the military and I did the full-time homemaker, wife and mom thing for a lot of years for a woman of my era.

That's much less common these days.

I got my first full-time job at probably age 41 while going through a divorce. Prior to that, I had maybe a couple of part-time jobs and did a little babysitting, but most of the time, I was a homemaker and I contributed to making ends meet by doing things like shopping sales and clipping coupons and cooking from scratch to keep expenses low.

My oldest son once said to me something like "My life makes sense." I don't remember what he was comparing his life against, but he was trying to say that I made rules for our household that worked well and if I made a bad rule, I was willing to change it.

So as a mother in charge of a household, my word was law for the kids. I wrote the rules, enforced the rules, changed them at will.

And if I concluded that something wasn't working, I advised my children "Whoops! We aren't doing that anymore. I shall come up with a new rule. If this comes up again before I have come up with a new rule and by habit I start to handle it the old way, remind me that I said we aren't doing that anymore."

Judges, lawyers, police officers etc. don't have that kind of power. There's a process involved in creating laws and a lot of principles have been worked out over many, many years for making laws -- AKA rules of behavior -- that work for large populations.

When making rules for my children, I don't really need to cover scenarios my children are unlikely to find themselves in. I have two boys. I didn't need "Rules for skirts and dresses." as a trivial example.

Laws at the city, state and federal level that leave out demographics like that while applying to those demographics end up being a problem and can end up being challenged in court.

Yes, we do have laws that are inherently problematic for some people. In some cases, that's intentional. For example, Jim Crow laws of the Post Civil War era in the South were intended to be unfair to newly freed slaves.

In some cases, they relied on social realities and expectations of the larger context to enforce them because they weren't necessarily written as brilliantly as they imagined.

They passed a law saying illiterate people can't vote because slaves had been denied the right to education and were not allowed to learn to read, so theoretically all newly freed slaves should have been illiterate. Then they added a Grandfather Clause stating you could still vote anyway if your grandfather had the right to vote.

This was intended to grant the right to vote to illiterate White people. The reality is that White slave owners routinely impregnated Black slaves, so the odds are very high some newly freed slaves had a White grandfather who had the right to vote, though they were illiterate and they understood the goal here was to deny them the right to vote and the movie Mississippi Burning was based on real world events.

Blacks got lynched somewhat commonly until I was three years old. The fight for Civil Rights for Black Americans wasn't metaphorical. This was war and White people were assaulting Black Americans and their allies for things like riding the bus and the link above is about three murders of people trying to register Black Americans to vote.

So I look at stuff like that and it gets my hackles up. It's not right.

But on Hacker News, someone was explaining some concept about types of errors and gave the example that if you wrongfully convict someone of murder, the real murderer is STILL out there. And no one is looking for them.

So it's not just outrage about one unfortunate soul getting a bad rap. It's a big problem if you make it easy for someone to commit murder, frame someone else and rinse and repeat to their heart's content.

So that principle about wanting a very high level of certainty in murder cases is a time tested rule that grows out of hard won experience which wasn't obvious to me as a former homemaker who never had to deal with something like that. That example was a big epiphany for me.

My "mom mentality" that I love my kids, warts and all, and can accommodate their difficulties and challenges because I'm nice doesn't generalize to the courts. My children aren't serial killers and the scale of the population I was making rules for is vastly different from what the courts deal with.

But I have studied a lot of humanities type subjects that aren't hard sciences -- history, psychology, negotiation -- and I'm clear that laws get written in a particular context and the laws implicitly assume you know that context and understand it. The written law doesn't typically come with a huge handbook spelling out what that context is for future generations.

And then they stay on the books and time marches on and currently we are seeing substantial changes in the lives of women and that's causing existing laws to go bad places because they weren't really designed with this situation in mind.

So what I'm trying to do is provide some historical context for existing laws on the books, plus additional information about where things stand currently so judges can use the existing laws to try to do right by people to the best of their ability.

And I think if you provide that, not all existing laws are necessarily straight up broken. The legal system expects people to make judgements and rulings. That's an existing part of the system and not something I'm asking anyone to add.

I'm just hoping to help them make more informed decisions about cases and existing case law.