Legalities

If laws are the fabric of our society then surely we have a responsibility for them to accurately reflect what is going on in that society? Clearly changing laws should not be something that happens without serious analysis and consideration of all the implications (or as far as such things can feasibly be taken), but it strikes me that we as a society are starting to fail in this task, as right now after looking at a few different areas it's clear to me that our laws are simply not reflecting what's happening in our society. Let me take a couple of examaples that seem pertinent.
Children. This seems to be one of the big issues right now that was highlighted to me in a recent case where some "child", 17 years old, murdered someone and because they are under the age of 18, that is to say legally not an adult and consequently not responsible for their own actions, they got an extremely mitigated sentence. Now in some cases I can see this as being a good thing, after all we'd like to think that when someone is very young they can reform their ways and be reintegrated back into society, however, my issues comes with a lack of consistency in thought. If the law in the UK says that someone is not an adult until they are 18, why then can they have consensual sex and children of their own while still being considered children, ie at 16? Now I'm not saying that the legal age of sex should be pushed up, actually if anything I'd suggest that people should be considered adults at the age of 16, but the point here is that there is no consistent thought to what the implications of one law to another mean. Of course all this is a little off track to keeping laws up to date with changing things in our society (well perhaps not completely, I'd suggest that the level of extreme crime at young ages is more of a modern thing then in the past, note i say extreme crime, not petty theft etc) so on with the things that seem more relevant to my opening statement.

Genetics. Genetics is one of those things that our legal codes need to start dealing with now. Already it's entirely possible for our society to do some fairly amazing things in regards to eugenics and no one wants to address the questions of what is and isn't legal and more importantly WHY things are and are not legal.  Eugenics is already practised in many places around the world, China being the most obvious example of it being embraced by a society and enforced by laws. It will be very interesting to hear the arguments both for and against the coming of the genetic revolution, Gattica anyone?

Computers. The easiest example for me to pick on due to my job and own experience with the law. Computer crime is obviously something fairly new, after all in the scale of legal codes computers are very new. Really you can say that computer crime laws came into their own category around the late 90's in most countries, and while there have been some updates to most of the original codes they are still hopelessly out of date in a few different ways. One of the fundamental paradoxes of computer crime is that more and more frequently the laws reference access via the Internet. A typical example would be a law that states (and i'm paraphrasing the australian law here as I can't be bothered to look up the precise wording) "it is a crime to intentionally modify, delete or access data on a computer not maintained by you". Of course this means that anyone who sends an email to another person is in breach of said law. When I brought this up with the then Senate rep for this type of thing (can't remember the tittle, it was during one of the more tedious meetings I had with the federal government while doing security work in Canberra) he smiled and said "I know, of course it means we can bring you in on that charge whenever we want". Nice back door for abuse of citizens that you don't like there sir! Computer crime is even trickier though, because people seem to overlook a fundamental thing, that being the Internet is a PUBLIC network. Think about that for a moment, the Internet is a public resource, just like a street. You have every right to walk down the street outside your home, because it's a public resource, just like I have every right, if we were to extrapolate from that law, to walk along the street and look at the houses and see if any had their front door open. Now I wouldn't be allowed by law to enter the house, even if it had it's door open, that would be trepassing, but it would be inconceivable to tell someone that they couldn't look from the street at the door, or even knock on said door. In computer crime terms though many countries have now made it illegal to do a port scan, the virtual equivalent of knocking or looking at someones door. Saying the Internet is a public network has other implications, spam for example. Spam is of course unsolicited, but just like it's not illegal (actually it is in some places in the world, but generally not in most that I'm aware of) to deliver pamphlets to a house, it shouldn't be illegal to deliver emails, after all, if you're on a public network, running a service for the explicit purpose of receiving emails why shouldn't someone send an email to you? Don't get me wrong, I'm not supporting spam, merely pointing out that by our current set of laws it should be legal, again though in many places it's not.

I suspect that the glaring descripencies between many laws are what causes the average layman to believe the legal system is broken, or at the very least not doing it's job as well as we would like. I'm not even going to delve into the world of copyright and patents and where to draw a line on what should and shouldn't be patented / copyrighted and what it means if that can be broken in a trivial manner, in particular if it's demonstrably unenforceable.