In the eighteenth century, when the legal and regulatory environment for everything was much simpler than it is today, the great Irish satirist Jonathan Swift compared laws to cobwebs because they seem to stretch in all directions to catch innocent flies while completely failing to stop wasps and other creatures responsible for far more serious crimes against human comfort. Like George McGovern, many people undoubtedly find this comparison at least as true today as they were in Swift`s time. After all, to be law-abiding innkeepers (or just citizens), we must negotiate an extensive network of constitutional, federal, regulatory, and state and local law; criminal, civil and common law; substantive and procedural law; public and private law; and commercial law, which includes contract law, product liability law, patent law, consumer protection law, environmental law, labor law, insurance law, cyber law, agency law and various other legal forms. In fact, it is virtually impossible to be a truly law-abiding citizen. According to one estimate, the average U.S. driver earns ten tickets a day. Other punished violations range from cable TV theft and scalping of tickets to exhibitionism and illegal fishing and hunting. See Timothy Sexton, “Millions of Americans Break the Law several times a Day without Being Punished,” Associated Content, September 9, 2008, www.associatedcontent.com/article/979756/millions_of_americans_break_the_law.html (accessed November 12, 2011). Subscribe to America`s largest dictionary and get thousands of other definitions and an advanced search – ad-free! “Flexible Constitution Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/flexible%20constitution. Retrieved 11 October 2022. Last summer, Louisiana also banned illegal adoption, with violators facing a $5,000 fine and up to five years in prison.
Unfortunately, the principle of predictability per se does not guarantee that a legal system is committed to fairness. For example, if the law only allows certain people to vote — say, landowners — it only gives landowners a guarantee of fairness in the electoral process. People who do not own property would have good reason to complain about social injustice in electoral matters, but only landlords could assert a right to fairness in court. Therefore, even under the rule of law, a legal system can achieve an adequate level of justice in a given social or economic activity only if it also guarantees equal treatment of all members of society. To be sure, the American legal system had not always been able to guarantee equal treatment before the law – the original thirteen states, for example, granted the right to vote only to white male owners, and women could not vote in all states until 1920. Since 1868, however, the United States courts have used the Fourteenth Amendment`s Equality Safeguard Clause to the Constitution to review a series of potentially discriminatory and unjust actions taken by governments at all levels. At the same time, however, we must point out that flexibility in the United States is, at some level, a feature of the law. Why do we say “at a certain level”? On the one hand, it is apparently not flexible enough at the level that George McGovern had to deal with. In all likelihood, a small hotel like the Stratford Inn does not have to follow the same fire safety rules as a hotel with 1,500 rooms, 100,000 square feet of meeting space, three four-star restaurants and a five-storey parking garage. However, laws cannot be written to deal with all the eventualities that occur during life in the real world – one in which millions of people and organizations are constantly engaged in various social and economic activities.
Therefore, when it comes to law, we are content with general “rules and principles”, and the key to flexibility in a legal system is flexibility at the level where rules and principles are applied. In the United States, the legal system continues to evolve to meet changing social norms and business activities, and through the judicial system, it is prepared to deal with any problem or dispute on its own terms. This section is based on Henry R. Cheesman, Contemporary Business and Online Commerce Law: Legal, Internet, Ethical, and Global Environments, 5. Auflage (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2006), 4. A state privacy law that went into effect Sept. 1 requires businesses, including businesses and government agencies operating in Colorado, to take appropriate security measures to protect the personal information they collect from residents. But the law intentionally made the definition of “reasonable” malleable. And as Brent Owen, a contributor to Squire Patton Boggs, pointed out, the difficulty of assessing adequacy after an information breach adds another layer of uncertainty to setting the standard. “They`re going to judge Google very differently than they judge a family store,” he said.
“Google receives many more types of personal information than a family store. And so the sliding ladder, they wanted it to be flexible to be able to call bullets and gunshots on these subjects. “Of course, there are abuses and mistakes on the part of judges and jurors, and procedural errors sometimes tip the scales of justice in the wrong direction. Sometimes, as in the case of George McGovern, innocent parties are forced to pay the cost of their defence in court. Overall, however, the U.S. legal system is remarkably fair. In a very fundamental – and very important – sense, McGovern`s reference to legal barriers to day-to-day business activities is welcome. In the United States, as in all complex societies, we have entrusted the government with the responsibility to adopt and enforce legal rules and principles. With this, we have approved the formation of a legal systeminstitutions and processes that enforce laws – the institutions and processes that actually apply our rules and principles. Mark E. Roszkowski, Business Law: Principles, Cases, and Policy, 5th edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002), 4. This system works like any other because its key elements are stable and interact reliably.
In other words, when applied consistently, the law is not always as flexible as it should be when it comes to doing what it is supposed to do, which is to preserve peace and stability so that members of society can continue their various social and economic activities. All 50 states have now passed laws regulating response to breaches for businesses or government agencies. But Colorado is the strictest, with the shortest notice period of 30 days from discovery and a broad definition of personally identifying information from Social Security numbers to fingerprints. The law also requires companies to have a policy on destroying information that is no longer needed. Search the dictionary of legal abbreviations and acronyms for acronyms and/or abbreviations that contain flexible. Rule of law: predictability and equity.