SOCIETY AND LAW

In an imperfect society, the law is necessary to deal with bad outcomes -- cases where people have not grown up with enough genuine affection for others to prevent them from deliberately harming their fellow citizens in order to achieve their own ends. Although our society does not have a culturally supported and coherent way of nurturing and educing empathy, our generally gregarious human nature usually pulls us through with the aid of what society, in its helter-skelter way, does for us. But, when individuals learn to use anti-social ways of achieving some of their personal goals, then remedial steps must be taken to protect the people of whom they would otherwise take advantage.

There are three dangers inherent in the law: (1) that people forget about the need to nurture and educate our young, and dump on beleaguered law enforcement authorities all responsibility for dealing with the consequences, (2) that, although society has established the law for legitimate purposes, some people may use the law as an instrument of their own private designs such as by using it as an instrument of oppression against one minority group or another, and (3) that, by specifying outcomes rather than by guiding proper growth and integration of functions of the individual, society will only succeed in forcing people to produce the outer signs of love, honesty, and other virtues, and will in the process lose the very substance of these virtues. So when the law is not used with care we may find a society characterized by a large number of psychologically misshapen people (many of whom are in and out of prison), systematic abuse of minority groups, and intense anger and frustration among all of them. It will largely be a society of hollow people.

For reasons outlined above, many people are fearful of the law and/or feel resentment against it. People may fear that someday the law will be directed against them for illegitimate reasons. One antidote against both fear and oppression is knowledge. So let's assemble and evaluate materials on the problematical uses of the law and of coercion.

One recent development that many people find threatening is the vast array of electronic spy devices available to ordinary citizens. For some slight insight into "what's out there" in the way of surveillance, see

http://www.pimall.com/nais/home.html
for services advertised by a major commercial house.

For state laws see:
http://law.house.gov

For a good general source on internet security concerns see:

http://www.thecodex.com/

For heavy-duty defensive steps see:

http://www.criminaljustice.org/PUBLIC/contents.htm

For a lawyer's view of cases where police brutality may be involved, see:

http://www.civilrights.com/police.html

Many of the issues of legal vs. illegal search warrants, search, and seizure are most commonly addressed on the WWW in the context of marijuana arrests. For an account of one author's recommendations on how to respond to search warrants, and to requests to make searches without warrants, see:

http://www.w2.com/law.html

See also, the following reviews:

http://www.roninpub.com/MarLaw.html

-- the publisher

http://druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/boire.htm

-- a reviewer

http://www.magnet.ch/serendipity/wod/rgb.html

-- a published interview

More general stuff on drug policy -- from a more libertarian point of view than not --

http://www.druglibrary.org/index.html

One interesting lawyer puts out a weekly analysis of questions of legality of procedures employed on the weekly "Cops Watch" TV program:

http://www.bevcom.org/copswatch/

The foregoing are given as unevaluated sources. Kinkaju is not a lawyer. When you read to educate yourself, change the old Latin adage to "Caveat lector!" -- Let the reader beware.