Too Many Laws. So Much Ignorance. Something Has to Give.

Seventy-five years ago, in the summer of 1942, four friends decided to while away the afternoon playing bridge in a Baltimore city park. Instead of enjoying their game, they found themselves under arrest. The city had an ordinance that forbade the use in a public park of any device that might be used for gambling -- such as a deck of cards. They didn’t know about the rule, of course. But under a longstanding tradition of our jurisprudence, ignorance of the law is no excuse.

Maybe it shouldn’t be. That’s the intriguing thesis of a recent post by Clark Neily of the Foundation for Economic Education. “America’s judges, Neily writes, “still cling to the proposition that it’s perfectly fine to lock people up for doing something they had no idea was illegal.” He doesn’t like it: “The justifications for that palpably unfair rule have only grown more threadbare with time.”