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vharuck • today at 12:15 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

>Retroactive amendments change the legal effect of provisions for a past period — an amendment published today can declare that it applies from last year. This retroactively alters the legal state at historical points in time.

I don't (personally) agree with this. Laws should be seen as applying in cases where parties and actions have certain qualities. A retroactive law does not state, "This actually applied to past events and entities." It states, "This applies to entities with the quality of having done an action or met some quality in the past."

I'm not familiar with the EU law system the article is based on. How would it handle a case where a person was found in violation of a retroactive law, and their past violating action was done along with another action that is considered illegal when done during a crime? For example, if somebody wrote that they never used illegal drugs on a government form, and a drug they had used is later retroactively declared illegal, can they now be prosecuted for having "lied" on the form?

Replies

Joker_vD • today at 12:45 PM

    European Convention on Human Rights, Article 7: "No punishment without law"

    1. No one shall be held guilty of any criminal offence on account of any act
    or omission which did not constitute a criminal offence under national or
    international law at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier
    penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the criminal
    offence was committed.
This doesn't preclude "beneficial" retroactivity: e.g. if some act you're currently incarcerated for is declared legal henceforth (or deserves less maximum jail time that you've already served), then you should be released.
psychoslave • today at 12:48 PM

If doesn't matter much for this kind of scenario.

Laws come in multiple flavor.

One flavor is for stating something already very consensual in the concerned community. That gives credits to law corpus as a source of justice, so people can somehow be accustomed that law is there to foster social justice through clarified terms visible by all. As opposed to unpredictable judgment of any random citizen along their mindset of the moment.

Then they are laws to throw made up arcana on how laws work. Citizen are still supposed to believe that laws in the end are balanced systems taking many things into account, so mere citizen won't have time, interest, skill and talent to call law by themselves. While they need specialists as middle man, they can still be pretended to be grounded on accumulated wisdom of common sense and consensual underlying basis.

There are also laws, there are their for serving a specific small class in the population, and favor their interest agaisnt all others. As they are well enshrined in the larger boilerplate corpus, there is no way to distinguish them from the others. Well, sometime of course they can be downright clear about establishing de facto inequalities to serve these interests. But they can just as well be thrown in a more diffuse way. Not all law maker are equally subtle of course.

This is not a closed set, many other flavors can be identified, like, "put my name of the glorious me in the title of this law everyone and its dog will have to deal with on daily basis".

Ah, and I almost forgot the flavor that make the most sense to talk about here. Make sure you have enough laws on every matter and the rest to be able to jugulate any layman who is annoying for the dominant class. Capital sentence is not indispensable, it's enough to have enough laws so basically anyone is de facto unable to not be guilty of many things, or at least can be prosecuted until they bind to the "morale order", or suicide.